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MOZART'S ‘GRAN PARTITA’ AND THE SUMMER OF 1781
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2011
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1 Tyson, Alan, Wasserzeichen-Katalog, Neue Mozart Ausgabe (hereafter NMA), Supplement X/33/2 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1992)Google Scholar .
2 Leeson, Daniel N., ‘A Revisit: Mozart's Serenade for Thirteen Instruments, K361 (370a), the “Gran Partitta”’, Mozart-Jahrbuch (1997), 181–223Google Scholar .
3 Wienerblättchen, 23 March 1784; Wiener Zeitung 24, 24 March 1784, 617; Schink, Johann Friedrich, Litterarische Fragmente, Band II (Graz, 1785), 286Google Scholar . The Wienerblättchen and Schink references are quoted in Deutsch, Otto Erich, Mozart: Die Dokumente seines Lebens, NMA, Supplement X/34 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1961), 198Google Scholar and 206 respectively.
4 Any conclusions drawn from the traditional dating of the Notturni k436–439 as compositions of 1783 should perhaps be reviewed, since they were thought by Alan Tyson to have been written in 1787 or even later; Tyson, , Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 33Google Scholar . It is, however, worth noting that there were basset horn parts in the aria ‘Traurigkeit’ from Die Entführung aus dem Serail, first performed in July 1782, which, with no record in the theatre accounts of others being paid to do this work, would have been played by the orchestral clarinettists – the Stadler brothers. Autograph scores or parts of the five trios k439b, now generally accepted as having been written by Mozart for basset horns, at a date unknown, have never been found (see note 14).
5 The brothers performed in concerts of the Wiener Tonkünstler-Societät in the Kärntnertortheater on 21 March 1773 and again on 19 December 1775: Vienna, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Haydn Verein, A 1/3b.
6 Saam, Josef, Das Bassetthorn, seine Erfindung und Weiterbildung (Mainz: Schott, 1971), 63Google Scholar . A letter to this effect was discovered in Schloss Harburg.
7 von Thurn, Rudolf Payer, Joseph II als Theaterdirektor (Vienna and Leipzig: L. Heidrich, 1920)Google Scholar , letter 22, 24 April 1782; 13te und 14te k: k: Theatral Hofdirections Cassae halbjährige Rechnung über Empfang und Ausgabe anno theatrali 1782, Vienna, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, ‘Generalintendenz der Hoftheater’, SR 19.
8 Mozart's letter to his father, 3 November 1781, in Wilhelm A. Bauer and Otto Deutsch, Erich, Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), volume 3, 171Google Scholar . The event was noted in Deutsch, Dokumente, 175.
9 A transcription of the fragment appears in Leeson, Daniel and Zaslaw, Neal, Divertimenti und Serenaden für Blasinstrumente, Band 2, NMA, Serie VII/17/2 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1979), 242Google Scholar .
10 Robert Levin and Marius Flothuis are reportedly among those who suggested that the fragment may be part of a discarded variation from the sixth movement of k361, NMA VII/17/2, xiv, xv.
11 Examples of watermarks and illustrations of paper folding appear in NMA X/33/2, Textband, xiv, xv. If folded and slit in the way described, the diagram on page 101, available online at <http://journals.cambridge.org/ecm>, may assist in elucidating what happened to the sheet of paper in k361 under discussion.
12 These watermarks are illustrated, with commentary, in NMA X/33/2, Textband, xxiii, 25–27, Abbildungen, 112–115, and Berke, Dietrich, NMA VII/17/2, Kritischer Bericht (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2002), b/74Google Scholar . Watermarks NMA 56 and 57 were numbered 1 and 42 respectively in Tyson's working papers, now in Special Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Paper with these watermarks has been the subject of further research in Dexter Edge, ‘Mozart's Viennese Copyists’ (PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2001).
13 Watermark ‘twins’ were discussed in a paper by Alan Tyson describing the manufacture of mould-made paper at a conference in Kassel in May 1981. This was later written up in Tyson, ‘New Dating Methods: Watermarks and Paper-Studies’, in Neue Mozart-Ausgabe Bericht über die Mitarbeitertagung in Kassel 29.–30. Mai 1981, ed. Dietrich Berke, Wolfgang Plath and Wolfgang Rehm (Privatdruck für die Subskribenten und Mitarbeiter der Neuen Mozart-Ausgabe, 1984), 49–68. A revised version appeared in Alan Tyson, Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores, 1–22. The pioneering work on the subject is Stevenson, Allan H., ‘Watermarks are Twins’, Studies in Bibliography 4 (1951), 57–91, 235Google Scholar .
14 One possibility is that the gatherings were intended for scores of the five basset-horn trios k439b. Such pieces could have been written down in short score (even directly into parts?) by the composer, with full scores being required in the event of publication. Thus each gathering was given a formal number, then progressed no further, only to be subsumed into the manuscript of k361 when the need arose. This could explain why scores of the trios have never been found, and opens the possibility that they were composed considerably earlier than their Köchel number suggests. An alternative view is that the gathering numbers were added posthumously as part of a procedure to collate the autograph, but the formal character of the writing suggests a permanent intent that renders this unlikely (see Figures 3 and 5). The first of these gathering numbers happens to coincide with the change from NMA 57 to NMA 56 paper and the start of the fifth movement, but there is no evidence that the fifth and sixth movements were ever separated from the others to require such collation. This is coincidentally supported by an ink blot on folio 27 recto, the first page of the fifth movement, carried over from a corrected bar-count number on folio 26 verso, the final page of the fourth movement. Such bar counts were typically part of the immediate process of copying parts from a score.
15 The collation of the autograph manuscript of the ‘Gran Partita’ (The Library of Congress, The Gertrude Clarke Whittall Foundation Collection, Washington, D. C., ML96.W56M97.Case) was examined by the author in 1974, and that of the Serenade in E flat major, k375, in its sextet form (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn-Archiv, Mus. ms. W. A. Mozart 375) in 1976. The analysis of all but the notional leaves is corroborated by that of Alan Tyson, to be found among his working papers, now in Special Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford. A copy of Neal Zaslaw's independent but identical analysis of the collation of k361 is also present among the Tyson papers. This formed part of an unpublished paper, ‘Mozart's Serenade in B♭ major, k361 (370a)’, written for but not used as the introduction to Gran Partita, K.361, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A Facsimile of the Holograph in the Whittall Foundation Collection. With an Introduction by Alfred Einstein (Washington D. C.: The Library of Congress, 1976).
16 Tyson, ‘New Dating Methods’, 52, and Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores, 9.
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