Concert for clarinet and orchestra (Mozart)

The concert was created from September 28 to October 7, 1791 for the famous Austrian clarinet player and friend Mozart Anton Stadler , to whom the composer dedicated the Quintet for clarinet and A-dur strings four years earlier. The premiere of the work performed by Stadler took place in Prague on October 16, 1791 , then Stadler performed a concert during a tour of Germany (including Riga).

At first, Mozart wrote 1 part of the Allegro concerto in the G-Dur key for basset horn (a clarinet variety with an extended downward range), as evidenced by the only surviving fragment of the concert manuscript. But then he rewrote it for basset clarinet in the key of A-Dur and added 2 parts Adagio and Rondo. Shortly after the death of Mozart, the basset clarinet began to go out of use, and music publishers rewrote the part of the solo instrument so that it could be performed on a regular clarinet , transposing some passages an octave up. The oldest surviving edition of the Concert is dated 1801 , the part of the solo instrument in it has already been rewritten for clarinet and transposed into A-dur.

Mozart Concerto on basset clarinet in A. is currently in fashion.

The composition is built in the traditional form of a classical concert: Allegro, Adagio, Rondo.

Part I

The first part of the concert is written in a sonata form with a double exposure. The main theme partly echoes the main theme of the Piano Concerto No. 23.

Part II

Perhaps the most famous part of the concert. It was written in 3/4 size in tonality of the fourth stage (D-dur) in a complex three-part form with an episode shortened by a reprise and a code.

Part III

Four-dark six-part rondo with a code. Size 6/8. Refrain in scherish, partly dancey spirit. The nature of the episodes is diverse, up to the dramatic (second episode). The third refrain is omitted, so the rondo has six parts, not seven, as is usually the case with four themes.

Among the early performers of the concert at the beginning of the 19th century were leading masters of the instrument - Bernhard Krusell (1802), Simon Herststedt (1809), Wilhelm Barth (1815); England became the first country outside the German-speaking world to hear the concert in 1838 , however, the reviewer of the London premiere spoke about the music ambiguously, regarding the slow part as a true manifestation of Mozart's genius, and both fast ones as superficial and probably only attributed to Mozart ^[1] .

• Concert for Clarinet and Orchestra (Mozart): sheet music by International Music Score Library Project
• "Clarinet in perspective time." An article by K. Rybakov in the journal Musical Instruments with the history of the creation of the concert (inaccessible link)