Mozarts Cadenzas For The First Movements Of His Piano Concertos

Many of Mozart's own cadenzas are preserved, but many more that he improvised in performance were never written down. In that spirit, famed pianist Lili Kraus sensed an obligation and a challenge to follow the tradition of using her own cadenzas where no original was available. This collection, then contains Mozart's original cadenzas as well as editorial versions by Ms. Kraus for Concertos 1-27.

A celebration and exploration of a monumental achievement

This book is a history of the cadenza in the Classical keyboard concerto. Whitmore focuses attention on the changing relations between performer and composer and between performer and audience in the course of the Classical period. The greater part of the book consists of an attempt to situate the concertos and cadenzas produced during the period within the broad historical development outlined in the first few chapters, placing particular emphasis on the contributions of C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.

This book demonstrates the proportional function of the cadenza in the first movements of Mozart s piano concertos and, specifically, the cadenza s role in helping to counter-balance the proportional gap between the exposition and the recapitulation created by the double-exposition feature of the Classical concerto form. It investigates Mozart s sense of symmetry within the sonata-allegro concerto form, which he powerfully expresses in the proportionally balanced construction of his music, and how symmetry functions as an underlying principle in the achievement of proportional balance between the exposition and recapitulation in the first movements of his piano concertos. Also, this book seeks to establish possible criteria as to how this sense of symmetry may inform the performer/composer of the concerto/cadenza in creating a cadenza of appropriate duration for the first movements of Mozart s piano concertos for which the original cadenzas are missing (KV466, 467, 482, 491, 503, and 537) and to verify the compositional and proportional integrity of the cadenza.