Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Born: January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 15, 1791, Vienna, Austria

Concerto in A Major for Clarinet and Orchestra, K. 622

• Composed: Began to sketch the concerto in 1786 and completed it in the middle of October 1791.
  
• Premiere: The date of the premiere is uncertain, but it was most likely premiered by clarinetist Anton Stadler for whom the concerto was written. 
• Instrumentation: solo clarinet, 2 flutes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns and strings
• CSO notable performances: First: January 1984, Myung-Whun Chung conducting; Richard Stoltzman, clarinet. Most Recent: September 2014, Louis Langrée conducting; Martin Fröst, clarinet
• Duration: approx. 25 minutes

The clarinet is a relative newcomer to the orchestral wind family. The instrument was invented in the early 18th century as a modernization of an old French reed instrument known as the chalumeau. The earliest known reference to an instrument named “clarinet” dates from 1716. Composers occasionally incorporated the new instrument into opera orchestras, but a number of years passed before it was used in chamber or orchestral performances. The early clarinet had few keys and was therefore not particularly agile. Thus the instrument was accepted only gradually. Furthermore, players were scarce. They were usually oboists who had hastily learned the new instrument. 

The clarinet was particularly popular in Great Britain. One of the earliest clarinet recitals was given in Dublin in 1742, and J.C. Bach used clarinets for a London opera production in 1763. It is likely that the eight-year-old Mozart first encountered the instrument the next year during a visit to the British capital. He subsequently heard it in several other European musical centers, including Mannheim during a visit in 1777, where instrumentalists were particularly accomplished. Carl Stamitz, one of Mannheim’s composers, wrote a number of clarinet concertos that foreshadow Mozart’s use of dramatic skips. Although Mozart no doubt knew some of the Stamitz concertos, he rarely incorporated clarinets into his own music prior to his move to Vienna in 1781. 

Mozart approached the clarinet cautiously. His early uses of it are not particularly idiomatic. The clarinet music in three divertimentos from the early 1770s, for example, sounds as if it could have been written for any treble wind instrument. Later the composer used clarinets in place of oboes in some orchestrations. On the rare occasions when he used both (as in the Paris Symphony of 1778), he usually relegated the clarinets to the role of unobtrusive filler. 

Soon after moving to Vienna, Mozart met clarinetist Anton Stadler. Although reportedly not as great a virtuoso as his contemporaries Tausch and Bähr, Stadler was known for the soft vocal qualities of his playing. Mozart found in Stadler a kindred spirit as well as a truly artistic musician. The clarinetist and the composer became close friends, and the influence of Stadler’s musicality on Mozart’s subsequent music was enormous. Stadler taught Mozart about the expressive subtleties of his instrument, and the composer produced several major works for him. 

The culmination of this happy collaboration was the Clarinet Concerto, completed a few weeks before Mozart’s death. In this work, the composer perfected his conception of the clarinet idiom. He took full advantage of the clarinet’s ability to play arpeggios, long held high notes, singing melodies, and dramatic juxtapositions of register. 

K. 622 had begun life in 1789 as a concerto in G major for basset horn, which is an alto clarinet on which Stadler excelled. Mozart had written basset horn parts for Stadler in a number of works, and now presumably he wanted to try it as a solo instrument. We do not know why the composer stopped after 199 measures and decided to recast the work for clarinet.

Had Mozart been composing for anyone but Stadler, he would have faced a problem. The basset horn’s lowest note is written C (the actual sounding note is G; the basset horn is pitched in the key of G), but the clarinet generally goes down only to E (sounding as C-sharp on the clarinet in A). The lowest four notes in the solo part would have had to be rewritten when the basset horn concerto became a clarinet concerto. But Stadler had a special clarinet, sometimes known as a basset clarinet, with extra low notes. Its written range was the same as that of the basset horn. Mozart thus did not have to rework the solo part but only to change the key of the piece from G major to A major. But he inadvertently created a problem for later clarinetists, who did not have extended clarinets. 

Since Stadler, who was not a particularly reliable fellow, lost the manuscript of the Clarinet Concerto, we can only guess what the original solo part was like. Prior to its publication the concerto was edited for performance on a standard instrument. The anonymous editor was not particularly skillful, however, resulting in awkward passages that have provided a dilemma for clarinetists. In 1974 a reconstruction of the original version was published, resulting in an attendant revival of interest in the basset clarinet. 

There is an interesting aspect of this problem that seems to have eluded musicologists who have studied Mozart’s use of the clarinet. This concerns what clarinetists call the “break”—a discontinuity in tone quality between B-flat (the note produced when all holes are open) and B (the lowest overblown note, produced by closing all holes except the “register key”). Clarinetists have always deplored composers’ seeming insensitivity to this discontinuity in sonority between adjacent notes—the thin sound of the B-flat versus the rich sound of the B. Even Mozart appears to have been guilty of such lack of concert, except when we consider the nature of Stadler’s extended clarinet. On his instrument the notes B-flat, A, A-flat and G could be produced either with most holes open or overblown with most holes closed. Stadler no doubt would have chosen the fingering that would produce the tone quality appropriate for a given passage, either to emphasize melodic continuity or to highlight contrast of registers. Thus most of the places that clarinetists may dismiss as poor uses of the break in the Mozart concerto would, no doubt, have sounded fine on the extended clarinet. 

The Clarinet Concerto is Mozart’s last completed work of major proportions. This fact has led some commentators to hear in it an autumnal quality. Other critics hear no hint of grief or resignation. However we interpret its mood, the work is one of Mozart’s masterpieces. The intimate character, the wealth of wonderfully melodic themes, the contrapuntal rigor, the adventurous modulations, and the magnificent treatment of the solo instrument all indicate that Mozart was working at the height of his powers, deeply inspired by the musicianship of his close friend. The concerto is a sublime work with a personality uniquely its own. It helped to establish the clarinet as a full-fledged member of the woodwind family, and it defined the clarinet idiom for subsequent generations of composers. Later composers who wrote extensively for the instrument in collaboration with virtuoso performers—Weber and Brahms are the prime examples—never went beyond the character that Mozart created under the influence of Stadler. It was only in the 20th century that composers devised new conceptions of the clarinet sound, thus finally breaking more than 100 years of dominance by this one composition on the entire clarinet literature. 

—Jonathan D. Kramer