Mozart Horn Concertos

Mozart’s Horn Concertos

The survival of Mozart’s horn concertos after his death is the result of a partnership, supposedly encouraged by Haydn, between Mozart’s wife Constanze and the young composer-publisher, Johann André of Offenbach am Main.   André had a genuine interest in Mozart’s music and was also eager to ensure the success of the publishing business which he had recently inherited from his father so the opportunity, in 1799, to buy all the manuscripts which Constanze had been left by the composer must have seemed too good to miss.    As a result, on 8 November he and Constanze signed a contract under which André paid 2550 Florins for her collection of Mozart’s manuscripts and, in addition, undertook to give Constanze four free copies of each work as it was published.   

Among these were the manuscripts, not all of them complete, of Mozart’s horn concertos.  None of these had been published during the composer’s lifetime, and in 1800 André wrote again to Constanze because he anticipated producing a complete edition Mozart’s music and was concerned about missing portions of the manuscripts of the horn concertos K417 and K495.   Constanze’s reply, dated 31 May, included a list of some fragments of horn concertos which she still had for sale and while André was only really interested in publishing complete works, he agreed to buy them as his interest in Mozart’s music went well beyond financial considerations.

The earliest of the works for horn in Constanze’s collection comprised some pages from a concerto in E flat which Mozart had written around March 1781 at about the time when he moved to Vienna.  The score was incomplete: there was no slow movement, and the orchestration was unfinished, and as such, it was of little use to André.   In 1856, on the centenary of his father’s birth, Carl Thomas Mozart compromised the music’s survival further by cutting up the pages of the first movement (a sketch known to Mozart scholars as “K370b”) and giving them away as souvenirs.  During the twentieth century, musicologists gathered up the surviving fragments, and while a few bars are still missing, and Mozart only ever wrote what appears to be a sketch linking the end of the movement’s exposition to its recapitulation, enough survives to allow a convincing reconstruction to be made.   As the Rondo appeared just to lack some of its orchestration, Breitkopf and Härtel published its sketches as K371 in their collected edition of Mozart’s works, and the first of many subsequent completions of the score was made around 1909 by the horn player and composer Henri Kling.   The discovery of a further 60 bars in 1991, which are demonstrably a part of the same movement, revealed a piece that is more spacious and elegant than was previously thought and these are included in the performance on this recording.  This two-movement concerto is performed here in a version by musicologist and pianist Robert Levin as K370b + 371.

Many of Mozart’s works for the horn were written to be played by his close friend, Joseph Leutgeb, who was said by the Mercure de France in 1770 to be so skilled at playing the instrument that he could “sing an adagio as perfectly as the most mellow, interesting and accurate voice.”  However, Leutgeb denied all knowledge of this concerto when Constanze showed it to him, so it is possible that Mozart intended it to be played by the Munich horn player Franz Lang – Mozart had been in Munich immediately before he moved to Vienna –  or by Jacob Eisen, the second (lower) horn player at the National Theatre in Vienna.   The solo part of the concerto certainly seems to have been written for someone who specialised in the instrument’s lower register, and Constanze told André that Eisen’s widow had some horn music which Mozart had given to the player.   However, in the same letter Constanze suggested that she herself had the manuscript of the Rondo, leaving the possibility that it was written for someone else and that Eisen’s widow had a different work in her possession.  

Joseph Leutgeb had been a family friend of the Mozarts since 1763 when he moved to Salzburg after a failed attempt to follow Haydn into employment with the wealthy Esterhazy family.  In 1777 he returned to Vienna, the city of his birth, and Mozart’s father wrote to Wolfgang to say that Leutgeb had bought a cheese business “the size of a snail’s shell” in the suburbs.  It seems, however, that Leopold was being unwittingly involved in a ruse by Leutgeb both to borrow some money and to persuade Mozart to write a concerto for him: recent research has shown that, while Leutgeb’s first wife’s family had once owned a cheese shop, it had closed long before the horn player’s return to the city.   Leutgeb’s attempt to persuade Wolfgang to write a horn concerto for him does not seem to have succeeded until he wrote the E flat concerto K417 in a manuscript teasingly headed, “Wolfgang Amadè Mozart takes pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox and fool, at Vienna 27 May 1783”.   While Constanze’s conversations with André suggest that there had been some doubt over whether she could provide him with a complete score of the concerto, and that even though parts of the autograph manuscript are still missing today, he must have received sufficient of it to enable him to publish it in 1802.

The manuscripts which Constanze sold to André included another horn concerto fragment in E major (K494a, Anh.98a) on paper which suggests that it dates from 1785 or early 1786.   It appears from the fully scored orchestral exposition that Mozart intended it to be the most ambitious of his horn concertos, but the orchestration fizzles out a few bars after the soloist comes in, and a few bars later the solo part stops in the middle of a phrase.   It is possible that Mozart continued the solo line on another sheet of paper which is now lost, but André had no use for so incomplete a work, and he did not publish it.   It was also unfamiliar to Leutgeb when Constanze showed it to him. 

Mozart’s next completed horn concerto was the most celebrated of them all, K495 in E flat.  We know from the composer’s catalogue of works that he finished composing it on 26 June 1786, but many pages from the manuscript were missing even when André was preparing his edition.   It is thought that, by 1786, and with his playing career coming to an end, Leutgeb was losing his high register, and André’s edition looks as though it may have been made from a score which the player had edited to avoid some of the higher notes.   Certainly, a more convincing – and seemingly uncut version – of the concerto emerged shortly afterwards from a rival publishing house, Contore delle Arte, and it is this which is normally used in performance today and which is recorded here.

It is very likely that the Concerto in E flat, K447, was written for Leutgeb to play as Mozart wrote his name twice above pauses in the score of the finale.   The autograph score reached André among the manuscripts which he bought from Constanze, and remains complete today, but the date of its composition is unclear.   It was always assumed that, as it does not appear in the catalogue which Mozart valued greatly and used to detail each new work as it was composed, it must have been written before he started the catalogue in 1784.  However, as the manuscript is written on paper which he only used elsewhere when he was writing Don Giovanni in 1787, most modern commentators agree that it was composed in the same year or perhaps early in 1788.

Mozart’s only remaining horn concerto is the enigmatic two-movement K412/386b in D major.   André, whose deep interest in Mozart’s music resulted in him being described during the twentieth century as “the father of Mozart research”, thought that the first movement and a draft of the rondo were composed in 1782.  By the end of the 19^th Century, scholars had decided that, while André was right about the first movement, the Rondo dated from Good Friday, 6 April 1787.  It was only when Mozart’s autograph manuscript reappeared in 1977 after being lost for over thirty years, that it was possible for the British musicologist, Alan Tyson, to study the paper which Mozart used in the manuscript, and to reveal that the first movement was finished in 1791.  He was also able to show that the second movement was drafted in the same year but was incomplete when Mozart died, and that the version of the finale traditionally performed (K514) was a completion by Mozart’s pupil, Franz Süssmayr.   Its first movement is tiny and is less than half the length of the opening movements of the contemporaneous clarinet concerto, K622, and the B flat piano concerto, K595, and Mozart’s autograph score is notable for the number of occasions on which he crosses out his ideas.   Robert Levin has suggested that both its brevity and the deletions may have been to accommodate Leutgeb’s failing powers – he would retire completely from horn playing in 1792 – so in his reconstruction recorded here, he has not only completed the orchestration of the finale but has restored several of Mozart’s deletions to attempt to recreate a version as close as possible to the composer’s original intentions.   

As Mozart’s manuscript score of the Rondo also includes a running commentary on the music, often at Leutgeb’s expense, Javier Bonet has included a bonus track in which he performs the same music, with actor Carlo Gianneschi reciting Mozart’s remarks.   He also interpolates a cadenza in which he introduces one by one the themes from all of Mozart’s other horn concertos.   He says this is his own joke against Mozart on behalf of all horn players!

John Humphries