Quintet [antikvár]

IIIW. A. MOZART Clarinet Quintet in A, K.581Mozart finished the Clarinet Quintet he wrote for his friend Anton Stadler on 29 September 1789. The Autograph is lost, and the only source is the set of parts published about 1800. There are reasons for thinking that the original clarinet part was adjusted for this publication, as was the case with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto.Stadler, presumably a good musician, was also an innovator. It is thought that he and his brother added two chromatic keys, C sharp and E fiat, to the recently-invented Bassethorn, and it is certain that he worked on a shortlived instrument best called the Basset Clarinet, though then known (confusingly, so far as we are concerned) as the 'Bass-Klarinett'. This was the invention of Lodz, the Court Instrument maker, who had also made improvements to the Bassethorn. By 1791 when Mozart wrote his Clarinet Concerto, the Basset Clarinet had a chromatic extension to low C, ä major third below the normal clarinet range. This instrument had been first played in public by Stadler on 20 February 1788, nineteen months before the completion of the Quintet.It has recently been proved, mainly by the late Swiss musicologist Ernst Hess (vide Mozart Jahrbuch 1967) that the concerto Mozart wrote in 1791 was unquestionably for Basset Clarinet. There is an obbligato for this instrument in Act I of La Clemenza di Tito (1791), and an examination of Mozart's sketches shows a low D in a fragment for clarinet quintet (KV. Anh. 91 = 516c) and a low E flat in a rejected fragment for K.581 (KV. Anh. 88=581a). These notes cannot be obtained on a normal clarinet. In other words, all Mozart's solo clarinet music at least from 1789 was written for this special instrument, with the possible exception of the Quintet.But is the Quintet an exception? There is an early Artaria edition in the Vienna Nationalbibliothek Museum in which the triplets in the second Trio (bars 81 and 116) are replaced by low quavers (D and F) that bring the entries into line with bars 118 and 120. Mozart would never have written a low D for normal clarinet. He was writing his Quintet for Stadler, and must have had his new instrument in mind. The low notes in the fragments mentioned above bear this out; the one with the low D has been doubtfully dated as early as 1787.In the excellent foreword to the Quintet volume in the New Mozart Edition published by Bärenreiter, Lodz is said to have extended the clarinet by two notes, and these perhaps were the E flat and D which occur in the two fragments. But they are just as likely to have been D natural and C natural, as on the first Bassethorn before the Stadlers' improvement. If so, the low E flat suggested below at bar 187 of the first movement could have been obtained by 'cross-fingering' (opening the D-E key, closing the C-D key, and further flattening by gently placing the tongue on the reed). In any case