WWMHD?

WHAT WOULD MOZART HAVE DONE? We have so much evidence of what he did do that it’s almost unnecessary to ask, but there is a handful of fascinating fragments of works he wrote for violin and piano – piano and violin, if you use the ordering he gave to the pieces – that warrant some extra attention, according to Timothy Jones.

Jones is a Mozart scholar who has spent enough years immersed in the composer’s works that he can combine a sense of what should be with an adventurous exploration of what could be. Four of those fragments are featured on a new recording by violinist Rachel Podger and fortepianist Christopher Glynn, with three of those fragments presented in two different completions apiece – a total of seven pieces, then, averaging about eight minutes apiece.

Podger recorded Mozart’s completed violin sonatas a few years ago, with Gary Cooper at the keyboard, so this could be seen as volume nine of that series – but it’s taking us into such different ground that it demands to be considered apart from the rest.

In creating these completions, Jones declared his ambition as being “to recognise the ‘openness’ of the fragments, test contrasting hypotheses about the material and then seeing where different assumptions might take the music over the course of the entire movement.”

Although Jones did his best to narrow the composition date of each, relying on such clues as handwriting and the manuscript paper, he was mindful of the spontaneity that characterizes Mozart’s work. While there can never be a “correct” answer to the question, as the fragment ends, “what comes next?,” Jones explored more than one completion avenue – more, in fact, than are offered here.

The most fascinating work on this disc is the Fragment of a Fantasia in C Minor that dates from 1782 and survives as 27 bars of a fully notated keyboard part with only five bars of the violin line written in. This came from a time when Mozart had been immersing himself in the music of Bach, and the influence shows in the sweeping lines of keyboard melody, leaving little for the violin, when it does come in, except commentary. Jones sketched in a violin part that also covers the rest of those 27 bars, giving a partnership to the instruments as the violin anticipates or echoes the keyboard’s melodic impulses, while leaving most of the many runs to keyboard alone. In the portion that Jones created there’s even more of a sense of partnership that culminates in a very characteristic finish.

That’s the pattern of the rest of the disc, with the bonus of that extra completion for each. Each is a sonata-allegro form, which gives more of a road-map for completion, although there has always been room for liberties within that form and Jones takes advantage of them.

Take the fragment in B-flat Major, K. 372. All we have is the exposition section, but the work is known in a completed single-movement form because Maximilian Stadler got to it. Stadler was a friend of Mozart who took it upon himself to finish some of the incompletes, and his version of this piece will surprise and offend no-one. Perhaps it inspired Jones to take it elsewhere. There was also some circumstantial inspiration, as Jones points out in his program notes. Mozart was visiting Vienna when he wrote the fragment, also boasted of his busy social life in a letter to his father. Jones wonders if the composer got too caught up in Viennese society to finish the work, but explains, “In the two completions on this recording I have tried different approaches to impressing those Viennese patrons.” The one we hear first, Completion 3, is the more traditional, spinning out a fine, inventive development section that easily exceeds Stadler’s approach, and opts for a traditional recapitulation. Completion 2 takes us into the development even before the exposition finish we’re expected, grows more harmonically adventurous, then teases us with hints of the recapitulation before actually returning us there with more where’d-the-theme-go games.

As she demonstrated in her recordings the sonatas themselves, Podger is a dynamic and sensitive interpreter of Mozart’s work. Pairing violin with fortepiano gives us an aural window into how it might have sounded way back then, although I believe it remains more of a novelty today than a compelling approach. Nonetheless, Christopher Glynn gets a sound from his instrument that not only well suits the style of Mozart’s (and Jones’s) music, but also serves as a sensitive partner to Podger’s playing. This is well evident in the fragment in A Major, the provenance of which is a little confusing: according to its manuscript-paper type, it could be from 1784. But Mozart used the same paper as later as 1787. Did Mozart’s style change much between those years? In the large picture, it’s subtle, but you get a keener sense of that contrast by comparing the two completions offered here, each of which locates itself in one of those years.

The 31 measures of the sonata fragment in G Major were written late in Mozart’s short life, a time when his compositions were showing a new simplicity, as Jones points out. There’s not much to go on – neither instrument is fully realized in this sketch – yet there’s a wealth of material. Although Jones explains that, in Completion 1, he “tried to keep the audible thread of the musical argument as transparent as possible,” it’s adventuresome enough to look ahead to Beethoven in some of its dynamic contrasts and rhythmic figures. Completion 2 is more daring still, even quoting from a Mozart concert aria because of some motivic similarities.

A fascinating project, a worthy and important collection of unknown, unfinished (but now finished) works – and best of, it’s enjoyable to listen to.

Mozart & Jones: Violin Sonata Fragment Completions
Rachel Podger, violinist
Christopher Glynn, harpsichordist
Channel Classics