5 - The keyboard music

Summary

If the name of Mozart is a touchstone for innate, absolute musicality, probably no genre has done more to accomplish this than the composer's keyboard sonatas. Collectively associated with such attributes as simplicity and naturalness of material, modesty of tone and facility of technique, they encapsulate the reception not only of Mozart but of a whole ‘Classical style’. This state of affairs has been encouraged by the tendency to view the keyboard as a ‘neutral’ medium, one useful for theoretical demonstrations in the classroom, in which Mozart is, as it were, a model pupil. It has certainly also been encouraged by the works' very wide exposure as piano teaching material. Both cases help to determine, and continually reinforce, the centrality of this repertory to the canon of Western music.

Yet there is another strand of reception that suggests anxiety about this very image of the sonatas, one that tends to imply that better Mozart can be found in other instrumental genres, including those in which the piano features either as soloist or in an ensemble. Within the output for solo piano alone, there is undoubtedly much that is more colourful, dramatic and elaborate than the governing image would suggest, including some of the sonatas themselves. In this context the pedagogical explanation has often been invoked. Thus the discourse of the sonatas precisely reflects the original teaching purposes the works were meant to serve, and more broadly the amateur market for such works at the time, considerations that have retained their relevance up to the present.