Concerto in A Major for basset clarinet and orchestra, K. 622
Allegro
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro
Program Notes by Martin Pearlman
Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, his last completed instrumental work, has long been beloved for the kind of profound mastery and emotional depth that one finds in his late works. The orchestration is subtle and beautiful, with flutes instead of oboes in the winds. The solo part requires a virtuosic player and uses the entire range of the instrument, but it has none of the technical fireworks of Weber's clarinet music. Nor does it have a solo cadenza. Rather, this is a sublimely expressive work throughout, with an achingly beautiful, serene second movement Adagio. The finale is a rondo in a lighter spirit, but it too has a poignancy underneath its dance rhythms. The musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon described this unique and deeply moving concerto by paraphrasing Shakespeare's Winter's Tale: "The heart dances, but not for joy."
The only music for this concerto that has come down to us in Mozart's hand gives only the first half of the first movement. That score from 1788 is in G major, a step lower than the piece that we know today, and it appears to be for a different kind of solo instrument, perhaps a basset horn, a low instrument that transposes down a fifth. But around that time, the clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler introduced a new instrument to Viennese audiences, a basset clarinet, essentially a true clarinet with a longer tube that allowed it to go four semi-tones below the bottom note of the normal clarinet. It was for Stadler and this new instrument that Mozart wrote his Clarinet Quintet, K. 581 and the solo clarinet part in his opera La clemenza di Tito.
In October of 1791, shortly before his untimely death, Mozart wrote to his wife Constanze that he was finishing a concerto for Stadler. It was this clarinet concerto, which was now in A major and written for the basset clarinet. Stadler premiered the work in Prague on October 16 of that year, but sadly, the finished score has not survived. All we have is a printed edition of the piece from 10 years after Mozart's death, in which an anonymous arranger has altered the low notes in the solo part to make them fit on a traditional clarinet. That is the version that is normally heard today. To play this piece on the basset clarinet, the instrument for which it was conceived, one must play a reconstructed version that restores the low notes where they appear to have been altered.
The basset clarinet
What is the basset clarinet? That is a more complicated question than it would seem, because there are no surviving instruments from Mozart's lifetime. The oldest ones are from the early 19th century. What Anton Stadler's instrument looked like, the instrument that Mozart saw, was not known until very recently.
In 1996, an American musicologist discovered a drawing of Stadler's basset clarinet in a program booklet for a concert that Stadler played on tour in Riga, Latvia. It shows a long clarinet with a bend in the bottom piece and an enlarged bell on the end. Erich Hoeprich, who performed the work with Boston Baroque, recreated a basset clarinet based on that drawing. It is made in the typical boxwood with brass keys. The drawing from Stadler's program book is below.
Boston Baroque Performances
Concerto in A Major for basset clarinet and orchestra, K. 622
October 26 & 28, 2018
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
Soloist:
Eric Hoeprich, basset clarinet
February 4, 1984
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor
Soloist:
Lawrence McDonald, basset clarinet