Next Saturday, February 4th, will be our first Classics concert of the new year at the Cohan Center. ”Suite Serenades“ will feature the incomparable French horn virtuoso Richard Todd and acclaimed tenor Christopher M. Cock. This dynamic duo will perform together with the orchestra in Britten’s musical setting of six British poems called Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Also on the program will be Mozart’s Symphony No. 4 and Stravinsky’s delightful Pulcinella Suite.
One of the highlights of the evening however, may be something you’ve never heard before. Maybe you’ve never even thought of it before. Can you imagine completing an unfinished Horn Concerto by the master himself, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Well, that’s exactly what Craig H. Russell has done in Allegro for Horn & Orchestra, which will receive its world premiere next Saturday night.
In case you’re wondering how on earth one goes about completing a Mozart Horn Concerto, we thought we’d share with you Dr. Craig Russell’s notes on the piece, just in time for Mozart’s 256th birthday. Enjoy! And we hope to see you next Saturday at the concert.
Allegro for Horn & Orchestra, KV494a (1786/2006, rev.2011)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791); Completed by Craig H. Russell (b.1951)
At Mozart’s death, he left behind manuscripts with snippets of themes, abandoned sketches, and unfinished works. Among these incomplete torsos is a Horn Concerto in E-Major (KV 494a). It begins magnificently but then ends in midstream. How frustrating. “Wouldn’t it be grand,” I thought to myself, “if we could hear the whole piece!” So, in 2006, I decided to try to finish what Mozart had started. It felt to me as if Mozart had left the ball on the 30-yard-line, and it was my task to see if I could push the whole piece forward and nudge it over the goal line. As much as possible, I wanted this piece to remain “Mozart’s” and not bear the trace of my own compositional traits or idiosyncrasies. To be successful, I hoped to make the “Russell” invisible and the “Mozart” highlighted. I’ll leave it to the audience to see how close I got to that goal.
Mozart’s manuscript pages for this horn concerto are presently housed at the Deutschen Staatsbibliothek Berlin under the call number “Mus. ms. autogr. W. A. Mozart Anh. 98a.” On the first page, Mozart scribbled out in red ink his title, Concerto a Corno principale (Concerto for a Featured French Horn). The beginning measures are complete and polished in every detail: Mozart has all of the lines written out, and he adds detailed dynamics, bowings, and articulations. But little by little, and rather early on, the information begins to diminish, until—when the solo horn enters—the accompaniment begins to evaporate altogether. Soon the horn abruptly stops in mid-phrase. At that point, I “pick up the ball” and move forward.
The scholarly research of Alan Tyson has shown that Mozart obtained the paper for this work in the spring or summer of 1785, shortly before he began composing The Marriage of Figaro. For whom did Mozart write this piece? No one really knows, but there are some believable theories. The scholar Franz Giegling suggests that this movement may have been destined for Jacob Eisen—the principal hornist for the National Theater in Vienna. Giegling cites as supporting evidence a letter from Constanze Mozart to Johann Anton André in which she states, “the widow of Jacob Eisen has in her possession a single [Mozart] score for solo horn.” In the 1960s, Richard Dunn proposed that Mozart might have begun this E-major concerto for Giovanni Punto, the horn soloist who premiered Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante, KV 297b. A third possible candidate for the potential dedicatee of this concerto would be Joseph Leutgeb for whom Mozart wrote most of those gorgeous horn concertos that we know and love. Giegling thinks Leutgeb is not a viable candidate and builds a plausible case for his view. Alfred Einstein thought this E-major concerto movement was probably a middle-movement sketch intended for Mozart’s Concerto in D-major (KV 412), a theory that seems nonsensical to me, since that would produce a pattern with two fast movements plus a rondo—and no slow movement at all. That structure simply does not match up with any other known Mozart work. Also, a typical classical concerto in D would never have a contrasting middle movement in the key of E-major.
So, we have several candidates for Mozart’s choice of horn soloist: Eisen? Punto? Leutgeb? In the end, no one really knows with certainty either the occasion or the person that Mozart had in mind. But I have my own flawed but enchanting theory—maybe Mozart was simply waiting for Rick Todd to come along and play this concerto! Certainly, nobody has ever played the horn any better.
Excerpted from program notes for the concert by Craig H. Russell
**Don’t miss Suite Serenades on February 4th at the Cohan Center. At 7 pm, Dr. Russell will present an entertaining pre-concert lecture on the musical program (including his own world premiere) called “Symphonic Forays.” The concert begins at 8 pm.
