thank you very much and good evening I could imagine that many of you would consider the ability to improvise in the style of modart as rarified and as intrinsically useless as the ability to improvise versus a iambic pentameter uh that to be sure there was a time when it enjoyed its Heyday and indeed the feat might be one that could be rather amusing entertaining uh even astonishing uh but its practical uses seem somewhat should we say uh illusory uh I hope to change your mind uh this evening and uh in so doing uh I can promise you that the evening will end with some live improvisation but what I'd like to do is to blend the riskiness of speaking extemporary in music with giving you a thorough background in the documentary evidence that we have of the centrality of improvisation in the creative Persona of Mozart and some of you probably know that Mozart improvised his cadenas and piano concertos uh that he often improvised embellishments in pieces of his that he performed and indeed that no public concert of Mozart was complete without a standalone solo improvisation uh indeed there is a famous passage from one of the first biographies of Mozart uh by nimich in which he said we did not know what to admire more the invention of the music or the beauty of how it was performed but when Mozart at the end regaled us with a 20-minute improvisation our feelings were transformed into pure enchantment we cannot of course bring any of that back but we can see actually quite a bit about the nature of Mozart as an improvise I in spirit and so without further Ado I'm going to start to aduce some evidence most of which will be presented in the form of reproductions of Mozart's manuscripts which are always rather entertaining to look at uh because he writes generally with elegance and only rarely with sloppiness so uh let's uh first uh go to the first uh slide which is number two and I'd like to show this to you this is a very very odd piece of music I actually played it live on the BBC in the in the Mozart orgy uh last year uh the uh manuscript that you see is quite obviously full of very rapid passages this is however not a piece written by Mozart this is in his 16-year-old handwriting and what it is is an elaborate decoration of a piece by somebody else which has yet to be identified so what it shows you is that Mozart as a creative exercise is writing down the kind of decoration that he would aspire to applying to works by himself and other people extemporary now what's interesting about it I'll play a little bit of it for you so you get a bit of the a taste for what I think you'll agree is most definitely not a piece in in Mozart's Style and so on uh it definitely has an 18th century sort of character uh but does not sound like the master from Saltsburg at all and what is interesting is that it is a piece in two halves and when you get to the end of the first half I'm going to try to see if this is going to actually work I've been warned that it's not very strong and I think that is actually quite true I can't even see where it is well let's try something else if you count the staves from the top which are in pairs the fourth pair has a first bar and if you look carefully you'll see a double bar with repeat signs and that bar which I will play for you now it's quite evident that that left and is designed to connect with the second half but it will not work if You observe the repeat which is written down there because that will produce the following this has led to people saying well Mozart made a mistake and what we need to do here is to create a first ending and a second ending the first ending which is not there will then lead us back to the beginning they miss the point what Mozart is writing out here is of course not the entirety of the composition but only the decoration of the repeats and hence when he takes the piece through its second iteration of the first half his decoration will connect to the second half undecorated which will then be followed by a repeat in the second half so a little bit of Phil philological uh intuition is necessary even to make sense of some of these documents anyhow as you can see uh there are a lot of hemid Demi semiquavers on the page and it shows that Mozart is almost overreaching himself in the exuberance of his imagination uh let us now go to uh the next transparency please and here we are going to be observing a work from Mozart's full maturity this is the second movement of the C minor Piano Sonata written for Teresa font tratner and this manuscript shows us that one of the most profound ways of approaching the use of improvisation in music of this period has to do with that crucial distinction between Kenna and leaba connoisseur and amateurs amateurs in the best sense that that is well-trained musicians with the tutelage of fine teachers but without that extraordinary creative spark and this distinction is one that was well defined in the 18th century long before Mozart came on the scene uh many of you will recall that Bach's one of Bach's Sons Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach wrote A series of sonatas for connoisseur and amateurs implying that his music would straddle the boundary between the experts with deep feeling and Imagination on the one hand and those who were well schooled CP ebach also wrote a series of sonatas with varied reprises and in those pieces what he propos opposed was to tutor people in the art of decoration at repeats by eliminating the repeats and writing them all out with inherent decoration you see Mozart's 16-year-old attempt can be understood under the guise of cpeb Bo's idea of sonatas with varied reprises now when he writes this Sonata he writes it down not thinking immediately about the requirements of his talented pupil but rather writing it down as he would use it in a performance now what you might ask is the distinction well let's take a look this is a rather uh uh good reproduction of this uh uh piece and if you look at it you see very very cleanly his methodical handwriting and if again you count the braces in pairs of staves and you get down to the fourth of these staves uh you will note that he writes the following this is well by the way those of you who wondered where Beethoven got the second movement idea for his path andado or now you know Beethoven did that with quite great regularity as a matter of fact it was his homage uh to Mozart in between that Gap we see in the typical way that Mozart writes Dapo from the beginning seven bars Dapo being Italian he uses Latin script for it seven bars are in German and he uses German script for thato and what he means then is to go back to the beginning and play the principal tune of the movement now had Mozart died before this piece were published and had it not been written for a pupil of his the two reiterations of this principal music when they came later in the piece would have followed this prescription and the engraver would obediently have reproduced exactly the tune as it appears at the beginning of the piece and we looking at this printed score would assume that Mozart wished this tune to be reiterated literally without the slightest alteration all three times because that's the way he wrote it down well you see here that he did not write it down and we get to the wonderful distinction between connotation and denotation he appears to be denoting the repeat of the tune but what is the connotation of this I leave this on the table for a moment because I also want to point out that you will see in the next to the last race in the final bar there are connective passages which are very very lightly pinned and are quite vague we shall see what the significance of that is in a moment could we have the next slide please this is the continuation of the same movement and you will notice it's cut off because I haven't reproduced quite the entirety of the leaf but if you look at the end of the second pair of lines you can see again Dapo and once again moart refrains from rotating the initial theme and simply leaves the space for it and what follows there's a large sharp as you can see in the beginning of the third brace and that's a q sign telling you to skip back here once you have played the initial tune so there are two reprises in addition to the initial statement of the tune and Mozart does not write them out now if you follow a little bit further and we look just under Dapo which you can see at the right between the third and the fourth staves you'll see the following there's a B flat on the right hand which goes down to a g in the lower STA and there's a funny sort of curved line like a slur that seems to be connecting them which goes like this I want you to remember that passage now he taught this Sonata fortunately for us to the young woman to whom he ultimately dedicated the Sonata Teresa font tratner and Teresa font tratner was an amateur not a con her and she needed what we in America call a pony that is she needed to be told what to do in the return of these pieces or rather let's put it this way she would need to know what to do if it should be the case that those reprises were not to be played identically to the first iteration so uh let's go back once again to the previous slide please just so that you can remember what this tune sounded like in its first iteration you notice already there's a bit of decoration going on there and the bit of decoration will sound creative in the context of growing out of the initial undecorated impulse but if you then reproduce this exactly the way it appears here in two successive times then in fact that little bit of imagination becomes Frozen and by being repeated fails to convince because it is no longer creative now let's skip past the second slide and go to the third one if we may and now we see a leaf of Music paper tipped into the manuscript of the C minor Sonata and in the upper margin you will see in German script at the first repre of the tune and then if you go down two braces you will see he says so he has written out decorations to be played for each of the iterations of this tune and you will see that they differ from the original and so on whereas the second one goes the now this is a r veritable tretis in ornamentation as you can see and you can see what a precious document it is indeed to have this and to realize that when Mozart therefore writes Dapo seven measures he means the substance is to be reiterated but the surface of the piece is to be deepened by decoration for all of the treatises are unanimous in this fact that the purpose of decoration is to deepen the the expression of the piece it is not to show off your finger virtuosity now if this were the entirety of Mozart's Legacy in terms of the decoration of this piece it would be extraordinary enough but there is indeed more and let's go to the next slide please there is likewise tipped into the manuscript of the Sonata a further leaf and this one is labeled variation Mar this is a different set of decorations from the one that we just saw it overlaps with them to some degree but one of the things that's particularly fascinating is if you look carefully you'll see a plethora of Dynamics pianos and fores which weren't either in his manuscript of the of the Sonata or in his previous suggestion of decorations from which it emerges that Dynamic coloration is as much a part of embellishment as adding notes and so we see here once again and so on you see this time if you look carefully it looks like there a lot of notes but it's actually one note one semiquaver loud one semiquaver quiet very elaborate kind of decoration then we see number two which is the second uh reiteration and so on but what we also see on this page is number three and in number three he provides a great deal of decoration to the final section of the piece so whereas before we heard now we suddenly have so even the playout is decorated so these two documents taken together show us a great deal about what lies if you will between the lines so decoration is an intrinsic place in which Mozart's ability to shake music out of his sleeves by improvising was something with which he reckoned he reckoned with it of course in uh playing uh solo sonatas but even more so as you might expect in the flamboyant world of piano caneros now one of the interesting things that we find in uh the piano caneros is that the orchestra and the soloist trade Tunes the same Tunes The Pianist may play First and the orchestra May Echo for instance if we uh uh could for instance go to uh slide uh number 11 please and uh in this we will see an excerpt from the principal theme late in the concerto played by the piano to which the orchestra responds now I don't know about you but it seems to me that usually The Soloist is is more highly paid than the orchestra and is to be playing a very important role in which virtuosity is at the foreground so it would seem rather strange for The Soloist to be outplayed in imagination by the orchestra if in fact the orchestra appears to be more creative in the decoration of tunes then perhaps you should sack The Soloist but I think the truth of the matter is that Mozart having written these ceros for his personal use did not need to write decorated versions of the tune when it came back because he would play as he says in a letter to his sister the first thing that came came into his head whereas of course the orchestra which by the way in Mozart's time was mostly sight reading they would only play what they were told to play so if Mozart has the piano playing to which the orchestra responds you should be thinking there's something wrong with that picture you see but in fact it's not not wrong if you understand the language of Mozart's notation as a private one for himself it's a scaffolding whereas the orchestra on the other hand needs again to be told what to do now one of the proofs that we have that orchestras did not rehearse if any of you are familiar with what orchestral Parts look like in orchestral scores you will know that either the the measures the bars are numbered throughout the piece so the conductor could say bar 225 please or it will have letters we'll say could we start six before letter B but in fact parts of the period have neither letters nor numbers so if the piece ground to a halt there would be no way to start anywhere except at the beginning so one wonders about some of the concerts in those days they could have been very very adventurous now i' like to go uh to I believe the next slide number 12 please and here we are indeed again in the world of the piano concheros this is the D Major piano concerto k451 the slow movement in G major and in reproducing the orchestral score I have to point out to you that Mozart's ordering of instruments is quite different from the one that we know today so in order to make sense of what you're looking at be aware of the fact that the top three staves the ones with the quaver is being repeated are those of the first and second violins in the viola underneath them solo flute solo OBO solo basson then there is an empty staff the two staves of the piano are fourth and third from the bottom followed by the orchestral base now it's a very interesting order of instruments this is not about improvisation but I just point it out to you uh when Mozart is writing a piece with trumpets and drums then the the drums appear right above the piano and the bases the Chell bases appear just beneath and in every staff in the entire score where he has not prescribed a virtuoso solo obligato part for the solo piano he writes call be with the bass directing that The Soloist play Contino accompany the orchestra now keep in mind the drums the piano and the bass all together can you think of another genre much closer to us that uses the drums and the piano and the Bas together in fact the only instrument that's missing is the guitar it's what's called in jazz the Rhythm Section and it's so revealing that Mozart groups these instruments together because the piano is playing the way count basy or Duke Ellington plays little riffs while all the horns are up and everybody is is really blowing their hearts out and then you know hearing that little riff from from basy that sooner or later he's going to take the solo and so Mozart is creating in his ghetto language of Vienna in the 1780s something which has a kind of invidious parallel to the ghetto language of Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s I don't think this is a stretching of the imagination and we see iconographically that this is the way it is and in this passage which I like to call piano REO you'll see that the piano has has a rather schematic Melody accompanied in these pulsating Quavers by the strings it's a very very characteristic way of expressing himself and having premiered it in this D major conero he then does it in the D Minor conero he does it again in the coronation conero he does it in the final B flat conero so you see it it is a a parando operatic kind of expression now what is FAS exting to me is that no sooner does Mozart send the score a copy of the score to Saltsburg so that his sister can learn it and we'll have a good deal to say about Nal his sister before the end of this hour because she it turns out is a crucial piece of evidence and improvisation in Mozart's creative activities as soon as she saw this she wrote back to her brother and said isn't there something missing from this passage she had never seen a passage like this but she couldn't quite believe that Mozart would have written something that was so should we say sketchy msart and we can go to the next slide writes back and says tell my sister writing to his father that she is quite right that there is something missing from the passage and C from my conero in D I shall remedy it as soon as possible and send it together with the cadenzas note he will send her the cadenas why because she like Teresa font trutner needs a pony she is incapable of improvising in another letter Mozart says I am very sorry that I have sent the cadens is so late but you see when I play this music I just play the first thing that comes into my head hence those who say that Mozart wrote the cenes to his piano concertos for his own use are surely incorrect if Mozart could improvise fantasies and variations and so on to the Delight of his public certainly a 1 and a half minute Cadenza was completely within his abilities and it is very revealing that with only one exception the censes to his caneros are always written on separate leaves of paper the one exception is k488 the a major conero and the presence of the conero within the autograph score I think indicates as surely as anything that this piece was written to be performed by someone else and before this hour is up you are going to find out who that was now this is non handwriting recopying what Mozart sent and you heard the unvarnished version a moment ago here is the other version that he sent her so the next time you hear the D Minor caneron you hear someone by I think you should be a bit annoyed that you're being sold a little short all right uh I just mentioned k488 let us go please to uh slide number 19 and what we are going to see here is a rather extraordinary document uh this is reproduced from the critical report report uh of the new Mozart Edition published by Baron writer and you will see at the lower right it says kirkl 488 and you will see to the left of that the Seal of the Royal Library in Berlin which later became the Prussian State library and is now the visits which is probably the most complicated name of the library anywhere in the world the uh State library in Berlin uh of Prussian cultural heritage and so it shows that this which is an ornamented version of the second movement of k488 landed in Berlin at the Royal Library and if it landed in Berlin at the Royal Library we can pretty be pretty sure that it probably happened through the inheritance of the Mozart estate so Mozart seems to have possessed ultimately this decoration of his piano conero in the hand of somebody else and at the time that this was printed in the new Mozart Edition in the critical report the identity of the writer was not known and they reproduc the entire manuscript which as you can see U presents braces of three staves in each case staves two and three of each brace are Mozart's piano part as he notated it in his autograph essentially undecorated the first of the three staves contains rather extraordinary rapsod decoration rather dependent on chromatic scales but the proportion of notes in each case on that upper staff compared with what you see below it reaches a point that is almost alarming revealingly the manuscript does not begin at the beginning of the movement therefore the assumption is that this that that initial solo heartbreaking as it is would not have been decorated the decoration starts in the second entry not right away but now here's the first bar where Mozart has this I think we all recognize this and perhaps many of you are used to hearing this passage played in exactly that way let me now reproduce what we see on that Top Line and so you're going to probably say oh that's pretty awful I mean what's what's the point of playing that after all let's go on to the next slide please uh and we see then you said hey well that's actually pretty good let's let's follow it a little bit further and we'll go to the uh return which is the second to last brace next please and I start saying hey wait a minute that's kind of good isn't it well I'm not going to draw this out any further uh about 15 years ago the identity of this scribe was revealed it is the handwriting of Barbara ploer Barbara ploer was Mozart's composition and piano pupil for several years in Vienna he composed for her and dedicated to her the E flat conero number 14 k449 and the G major conero K 453 and for obvious reasons one would suspect this canero must have been written for her else why would she be writing out such an embellishment now some of you may say that the quality of what you have seen in its entirety is insufficient to give this document legitim with all due difference I would say if that's the way you feel I think you are misreading the evidence the importance of this evidence is not the qualitative element but the quantitative one Barbara ployer even being Mozart's pupil did not have his genius she did not have the hindsight of 200 years that we have to gain insights into what is mozarti and and what isn't but one thing we can be absolutely be sure of she would not have been writing down an embellishment with hemid Demi semiquavers when Mozart wanted dotted crotchets she heard him play She studied with him what this document conveys to us is the sheer amount of decoration that was taken for granted and what this shows us and I find this remarkable is when you compare Mozart's music then as he is likely to have played it with the music of shopan who revered Mozart and whose written scores are filled with Cascades of whipped cream you realize that actually the amount of decoration in these two may have been much closer together than we suspect the only difference being in one case it is notated and preserved forever and in the other case it was a more volatile kind of thing so here again the relationship between kissers and amateur between Mozart's centrality of improvisation as part of his concertos emerges in documents if only we had recordings yes but the documents tell us things that we might otherwise not have noticed now uh can we go to uh slide 28 please this is a passage from the last movement of Mozart K4 82 the 22nd piano conero and once again as you would expect you can see the piano part is the third to the second staves the Bas is on the bottom the strings are on the top and the winds are in the middle and uh as you can see there are broken octaves this is an extremely virtuoso and very demanding passage and you're going to see what happens on the second page when I get there I'll cue you Natalie let you know when that happens and we have next slide I have a recording at home in which The Soloist actually plays that and nothing else but I think fortunately these days people would regard someone who did that as as really bordering on the grotesque uh clearly what Mozart wanted here was arpeggiation of common words and he he scarcely needed to write them down uh in order uh to remember that that's what he intended to do but it's not entirely atic how those common chords are supposed to be played because if you simply start you're going to run out of keys on on the piano to play so it actually has to be broken up with some skill and so on so it it took some planning but Mozart evidently trusted himself and uh we see in many of his ceros these kinds of white passages he resorts to abbreviations he'll write when clearly the scales are supposed to continue he will at sometimes decide not to write out broken octaves he'll write when clearly what he wants I shouldn't say clearly because nobody does it I think it's really quite clear that that's what he wants cuz he starts to do it before he reverts to to abbreviation or see it's very strange that in a single line Melody suddenly there are octaves but it's not strange if you break the opos so there is a great deal of of philological uh examination in these caneros that can show you some interesting things uh can we go to 45 please here I want to uh get into the world of cadenzas because this is one area in which most people really do accept the fact that Mozart made these things up on the spur of the moment but that nonetheless he wrote out cadenus for his pupils and for his contemporaries and of course here we have the G major conero the second of the Barbara pler concheros and what I have done here uh it's hard to read what I've done is I've gone through the Cadenza and I identified for every measure of the piece the passage in the movement proper from which Mozart has stolen that idea and what you can see even without my playing through this Cadenza is that the first two bars come from bar one and the third bar and follows comes from bar 311 and on the next page it's next line it's bar 60 and then bar one then 62 then 254 then 153 184 so it's a fantastic jigsaw puzzle in which he deconstructs the piece and reattaches little ideas within a basic dramatic structure which is relatively stable for all of his ceral censes and so this does something quite extraordinary you see the stream of consciousness of skipping around everywhere gives us the impression that the piece is being made up on the spot grabbing from the TOA do dinner and having you know a few dumplings over here and a little bit of brisket of beef over there and some chicken breast and maybe a fish cake or two and uh he he chooses and Regals himself and the sense of non-continuity in the material encourages The credibility of an an improvisation one must assume that that this kind of borrowing from here and there was something of which mozar was fully capable but again we can be so infinitely grateful for the less talented than he without whom we would not have any inkling of these things there remain six ceros by Mozart for the piano for which we do not have cadenas and some people will play say in the D Minor conero beethovens rather splendid inventions but Beethoven comes already from another generation and Beethoven's censes do not adhere to a basic principle which is Central to Mozart's cadenas and which is not violated by a single one and that is that no Cadenza by Mozart goes to another key ever and if you say well what about this he's in C FL major you'd say no no no no no if you simply have a deceptive kinge that's simply borrowed from your termal world it's a coloration within the basic key if you went from eat major to G major that would be another matter and beov does this bethoven breaks that glass and when you break that glass and the piece the Cadenza is free to go to any key however far removed the idea of the original Cadenza which was for the voice and which had to be sung in a single breath every tretis reviled singers who took more than one breath to sing a cadenza well The Pianist of course wasn't confined by that and so you could go on but if you move to other Keys the expectancy of waiting for the resolution if you're in another key how is the audience going to remember what key they were in and that you're waiting for the orchestra to come in with that tra only Mozart cared about these things Mozart was the only person who took the Aristotelian concept of unity of time place in action and extracted the corollary that his operas must begin in the same key in which they are to end and they are to end in the same key in which they began that the unity which which means that a play and an opera takes place within 24 hours is underscored by that yes it's true that vogner lren and MinGa do that too but none of his other operas do and so it shows that whether he doesn't one is not part of his Central aesthetic but if he got begins in d and ends in d and so does Don chani and Kant and salio begin in c and end in c and Magic Flute begins in E Flat and ends in e flat this is not a coincidence and in fact uh my colleague Mr stepto has argued that every time there are false emotions in kosif Fant uh the music moves up by fifths and every time there are real emotions it moves down by fifths and I would not be surprised if Moz planned something like that because he's a wizard about those things but in terms of these censes you see there are principles of construction that you can observe from these now I've saved the most volatile part of of all of this uh for the end and I'd like to go if if we can uh to uh slide number 51 please Nal as I have said to you was very well trained as a Pianist but she could not improvise therefore when Mozart sent keros he had to provide her with cadenas and as we've seen even with suggested embellishments but in the 18th century if you were going to play two pieces in succession that were not closely related to one another it was considered aesthetically uncouth to go from one far removed key to another so so that for instance if I decided that I was going to play say the D major Sonata uh K 311 and I get to the it would not be considered uh proper for me to start go on with doing this would be considered an affront to the sensibility of cultivated musicians what a composer like Mozart would do would be to improvise a modulating prude which would take you from one key to the next like getting on the moving stairway and heading from lerie to women's sportsware and this interestingly enough is a task for which NR asked help she wanted MO start to write out pseudo improvisations so that she could memorize them and for them on her audiences as allegedly improvised pieces and once again thanks to that fact we possess something like this this is the first page of a three-page modulating produ which goes from F major to E minor on this page and continues from E minor to C major on the following two pages and therefore it could be used in its totality to modulate from F major to C or it could be split into segments and she could play pieces in the intervening tonality so it was an extremely practical way of giving her a multitude of solutions to a single problem Mozart writes at the top revealingly the basic building blocks of tonality the common chords in C major of tonic and dominant and subdominant followed by the same in minor that is if you wish the invocation now what he proceeds to do here in this Prelude and if you look at it very carefully you will see immediately that it is non-metrical how many non-metrical pieces by Mozart do you know this is something really quite extraordinary but if you ask yourself H we know that there are other composers who wrote non-measured prudes l k wrote them but then he didn't write with this kind of detail in normal rational meter he actually just wrote uh semi Brees and let you decide what the speed and Metabolism was going to be but there was somebody who did this and it was Carl Philip Emanuel Bach who in his final chapter uh in the essay on the true manner of playing keyboard instruments discusses the free fantasy that is improvisation he says the best way to improvise a fantasy is to take a baseline which has a clear sense of direction then put some figures above it which identify the chords which will be strong in syntax and then you can hang the curtains of your imagination on this strong curtain rod so it can be purely virtual so passage work or it can be thematic and Mozart illustrates this in this uh Prelude which I'm going to play for you in which essentially he bases it on this so in the end he's managed to go from F major to E minor which would be inadmissible in a public concert without a link of this kind and this is how he does it if we were to go on to the next page we see that the piece then moves onwards and it would not matter in the least if he interrupted the flow of this PR at that point and played a piece in E Minor and then continued with the latter part of the pr because that motive of would remain in your head and you would remember it even 10 minutes later that that was how you got there and now how that was how you were going to move farther so Mozart wrote this down in salsburg and he was clearly showing nanal how to do this in the naive hope that his instruction would open up the sloo gates of her Creative Energy and that she would be able to do this go please to the next slide you'll see the continuation of this Prelude about six staves down but above it you see figured bases this is nural writing and if you go on to the next slide please you see on the reverse side there are more nonoral bases and if you go on to the next slide after this this is an example a diplomatic transcription of what nanal is writing and you see that she's writing I'm I mean this is spinning its Wheels is what it's doing you know this is not cogent creative expressive music and it shows why she needed to ask her brother to do this and thank God she asked him and thank God he did it because we would never imagine any improvisation of Mozart looking like or sounding like what you just heard so this is in a nutshell a condensed version of many many documents that we have which all Point as I say to the centrality of improvisation in Mozart's creative Persona we have seen it in Nim's description and in dorf's autobiography he says of course everybody in Vienna improvised but the only person whose improvisations were worth listening to as real music were the those of Mozart and Mozart is balancing a clear architectural sense with an extraordinary rhythmic fluidity and a flexibility of discourse the fact is that in his written compositions he counts bars there is a number at the end of the first half of a Sonata at the double bar which is the number of bars in that first section of the piece and then there is a bar number at the end of the movement why is Mozart writing down these bar numbers if it's not because proportions hierarchy are Central to his way of thinking uh I will finish the formal part of this presentation by telling you an anecdote which I think you'll find revealing in this respect the great Mozart scholar vulang plot who was the reigning expert on Mozart's handwriting he could look at a natural or a sharp and dat it to within 6 months based on the calligraphy of of of how he did he said oh you see the in such and such a year he stopped writing the natural with two right angles and he started to do it with an oblique line and you think oh my God this is amazing uh he in alborg and Alan Tyson his opposite number at All Souls in Oxford who made a complete inventory of the music paper on which Mozart wrote his music on the basic premise that if in fact Mozart wrote eight pieces on this particular type of paper and five of them are dated it's reasonable to suspect that the other three came from the same period and that quite reasonable idea has redated some of Mozart's Pieces by more than 10 years which is a third of his creative lifespan and the fascinating thing is that in Oxford Allen Tyson working independently of vulang plot in alburg have reached about 95% unanimity in their days it's a fantastic forensic World anyhow Dr plot finds himself staring at a sketch Lea of mozarts which has a fair amount of scribbled music on it but it also has a number of figures that are being added up and Mozart was fascinated with figures we know that he used chalk and wrote figures on the walls and on the floors much to the discomfort of his parents he never went to school of course for a single day but there is a sketch Leaf by Mozart in which he's playing around with number Theory can you imagine a person who never went to grammar school who was fooling around with numbers which have two factorials and three factorials now do you think he's doing it as a hobby or maybe it has something to do with the way he writes music ah well Dr plot is looking at this this Sketchbook and a sketch leaf and he sees in at one point in this on this thing he sees three columns of figures which are being added up and of course he's curious he say I wonder what Mozart is calculating here and quickly he becomes unnerved and thinks how could I possibly know it was 200 years ago he could have been adding up receipts from his lessons he could have been totaling up clothing bills or food bills I mean there any number of things he could have been doing that would be impossible to Divine 200 years later and he was about to give up when he suddenly thought is there anything that he could be calculating here that I could know bar counts yes he could be counting up bars now wait a minute there are three columns and there 8 10 11 in a column can't be a can't be a symphony or a quartet they only have three or four divertimento would have five or six not this many and Opera it could be an Opera couldn't it three columns three acts wait a minute let's have a look at the music on this sketch Leaf I recognize that tune there that's a piece he wrote in 1782 what op yes Mozart in 1782 wrote the abduction from the Calo and and it has three acts let's open it up first figure Overture second figure belon zarya bang he hit the jackpot it's amazing isn't it that 200 years later he could do that that is in fact amazing I mean plot was a was a genius of a scholar but more important than plot's genius at discovering this is the fact that Mozart is adding up the bar counts of the individual pieces in his Opera he is looking architecturally he is proportionately these things matter to him in a way that they didn't matter to a lot of other people and what this means of course is the sense of effortless Perfection that we get when listening to a Moz piece that seems to be absolutely comprehensible by the smallest child but drives the seasoned interpreter to despair my dear wife with whom I play piano Duos all the time the Taiwanese pianist yaf Trang says that she would gladly play the RO man third conero 10 times before she'd play a single Mozart conero because the Mozart caneros are so much harder and it may not be a conventional point of view but those of us who who perspire on the stage with Mozart uh can attest to the fact that it is unforgiving of imperfection so having ended now my formal presentation uh it seems to me that the proper thing to do is to conclude the evening's offering with an improvisation and the improvisation it seems to me to prove that it is truly being improvised uh ought to come uh from thematic suggestions made uh my dear Audience by you so uh I'd like to ask if if anyone would like to raise a hand and suggest a tune that you'd like to have used in this uh improvisation since it's going to be in the style of Mozart I would appreciate it being either by Mozart or uh close to Mozart in its uh in its utterance it could be by Heiden or if you like could be by early Beethoven uh but not barely those are Beatles or anything like that it's not not really what what I've have in mind but are are there some volunteers to suggest a tune that you might like yes ah you want the first the first bars of k465 well I'm happy to do that of course basing a whole piece on that is uh something that even Mozart decided he didn't want to do but that's all right let let's throw it into the mix what else are we going to have yes okay maybe one more yes okay F major that was very kind of you you see since the the deani is also an F major you know sometimes if I have far flying things I uh I have to separate them I think under those circumstances uh why don't we put k465 in the middle that will force at least a relation by Fifth to intervene so uh we'll have the Rosen ARA the de from act four of figuro um a passage from the distant quartet and then the principal theme of the F major Sonata k332 do fasten your seat belt so I think you may want to have a certain stability h for h oh