Embellishing Mozart’s C-major Quintet

January 20, 2025, 3:02 PM · For many of us who play music by canonical composers like Mozart, the notated score is sacred. Our job as performers, we might think, is to realize the notation as faithfully as possible--and this means in particular that we can't just change things without Mozart's permission.

But this isn't how musical scores were treated during Mozart's lifetime. It's now clear that Mozart and virtually all his contemporaries expected performers to make many changes to the music they played, especially through the insertion of elaborate cadenzas, lead-ins ("Eingänge") and embellishments.

Research into these topics has been carried out most thoroughly in studies of Mozart's keyboard works. And the practice of improvisation and embellishment in modern-day performing culture are most closely associated with pianists, especially Robert Levin, who has recorded highly embellished readings of Mozart's complete piano sonatas and piano concertos. (There are very few exceptions; one of them is Nils-Erik Sparf's lively, totally uninhibited, and daringly unconventional recording of Mozart's violin concertos.)

One reason for this keyboard-centrism is the historical fact that Mozart identified primarily as a virtuoso pianist for much of his career, and studies of his performing practices therefore inevitably lead back to his activities as a keyboardist. In my own recent book on Mozart, which devotes a chapter each to improvisation and embellishment, keyboard music features more centrally than string music for this reason.

In addition, there's more direct evidence for Mozart's stylistic embellishment preferences, in the form of manuscript models, published variants, and pedagogical samples, in his keyboard output than in his output for other instruments -- though in my book I try to show that this needn’t be an impediment to transferring those precepts into his non-keyboard works.

But I wonder whether there's another, perhaps more interesting, reason that most Mozartean embellishers are keyboardists. Much of Mozart's keyboard music is written not just for a soloist playing alongside accompanying forces, but rather for an individual player, as in the piano sonatas or in so many concerto passages where the orchestra drops out completely and the soloist forges on alone. In such context, embellishment presents the fewest possible practical obstacles. The performer who plays entirely alone can do all sorts of things to mess with the score, never once worrying about the effect this might have on collaborators. Thus, Levin's hilarious reading of the last movement of the Sonata K.283 features madcap textural changes and transpositions, and Andreas Staier's brilliant recording of the last movement of the Sonata K.331 introduces some unexpected contrapuntal tricks during repeated passages: interventions that would be impossible in a work for multiple performers.

For us string players, however, everything we play by Mozart is a work for multiple performers. What are we to do?

I started asking such questions in earnest last year, when I recorded Mozart's violin-viola duos (and I blogged back then about many of my performance decisions, including the embellishments and cadenzas). One of the reasons I selected those pieces as my entry-point into embellishing Mozart's string music is that the players are comparatively unconstrained. Although there are many instances of real textural complexity, there are also plenty of phrases where the violinist plays the tune and the violist accompanies. (This did not stop me from inserting a surprise viola Eingang in the first movement of the B-flat duo!) The practice of writing and performing embellishments for the duos was highly instructive -- but at no point did it challenge my fundamental understanding of the topic.

This month, however, I'm performing the great String Quintet in C major, K.515, perhaps the most daring and ambitious instrumental piece Mozart wrote. Part of the pleasure of doing K.515 is, of course, simply to spend 40 astonishing minutes inside Mozart's mind at this high point of his compositional life. A nice add-on, however, is that I get to try to embellish using the piece as a limit-case: a piece where embellishments are always stylistically appropriate but extremely difficult to pull off in a way that seems musically appropriate.

One of the hardest things about embellishing in K.515 is that counterpoint features centrally throughout the work -- and this means that very few melodies can be tweaked without wreaking havoc among the other parts. For instance, the final theme in the first movement exposition might look like a perfect candidate for embellishment:

However, following those first four bars, the theme is immediately played in octaves between the first and second violins, and imitated contrapuntally by the first viola and cello. The first violinist can embellish mm.132-35, but short of pre-coordinating some embellishments with the other players (an obvious no-go, since it would shatter any semblance of improvisatory freedom) this would mean that the embellished theme is followed by a necessarily unembellished restatement. But that, in turn, undermines the very purpose of embellishment, which is meant to ratchet up the intricacy and intensity of a melody, not disappear and let the intensity wane.

Then there are passages like this:

Here, it's entirely possible to insert embellishments! First off, the violinist spends four bars sitting on a D dominant 7th chord. It’s trivial to turn those bars into a stylistically-appropriate Eingang of some kind. I jotted this down, but the possibilities are endless:

However, problems pile up in the following phrase. Beginning in m.86, we get another melody that looks like it should be eminently embellishable. There's no immediate contrapuntal imitation until the following phrase, and the first violinist is just as free as any concerto soloist might be, with all four other players holding long notes beneath the tune. But look closer, and once again constraints lurk. The voice-leading is such that, when we move from tonic to dominant in m.87 and m.89, the first violinist still needs to hover somewhere around the fifth scale degree, as in the unembellished original. Move anywhere else and we'd hear parallel octaves, since the second violinist controls the third scale degree and the two violists control the first scale degree. How to get around this? One possibility would be some sort of chromatic wiggle that hews closely to the original shape of the phrase:

As far as embellishments go, I like that one -- though it hardly draws attention to itself as a florid embellishment.

This previous example points to the most pervasive difficulty in embellishing Mozart's chamber music. Mozart favored an embellishment style full of chromatic sinews and twisty gestures that circle around the notes they embellish rather than connecting them in a direct scale. But introducing such winding, circuitous embellishments often brings problems of voice-leading in music so densely notated as these string quintets. This is not to say that embellishment is impossible; but the performer who wants to embellish is certainly on a leash.

In the slow movement, these challenges are slightly diminished. The recurring theme calls out for embellishments, as do all repeated themes in Mozart, and here the soloistic nature of the first violin part makes intervention easier than it was in the previous movement. One of the interesting questions here is how to treat the many short rests (an eighth note, a quarter note) in the first violin part -- whether florid embellishments can just cross over those silences, as Mozart's own written-out embellishments often do in his keyboard music, or whether the silences need to be observed in order to clear aural space for interjections from other players. My solution has generally been to cross over the rests; thus, this cadential figure returns twice and can be treated with various embellishments--perhaps a diatonic arpeggio on its first recurrence and a twisting, chromatic scale on its second:

Then there are passages where playful imitation occurs between the players, and embellishments in the first violin part will be a spur to creative invention for the first violist:

So far, I've composed embellishments for the first violin part in the first two movements. The minuet, like the first movement, offers very few possibilities (though I'll certainly come up with some chromatic variants for the cadence gesture in m.9 (and m.23 of the Trio section). But it's the last movement I'm most excited to do, where the rondo theme repeats a few times across the movement and feels very much like the soloistic rondos elsewhere in Mozart. It should offer plenty of opportunities for embellishment--and, as with the previous movements, I'm sure I'll learn a lot in the process of writing them!

Of course, it’s worth remembering that embellishments are not simply about "adding notes" but rather about enhancing the expressive nature of each phrase. Embellishment, when carried out well, reveals something of the content of the music. Those melodies with the seeds of comedy become funnier through the addition of wacky grace notes; those that are heartfelt or singing become more so through the addition of melting, chromatic sighs; those that lean more to the tragic can be infused with dissonances that tug and release.

Embellishment is an interpretive, expressive act -- and, as such, the challenge is to do it carefully and do it well. We know that Mozart expected performers to embellish his music, including his violin works; my goal, in this project and others, is to use performance as an opportunity to find out just what is possible, in practical terms. Last year’s string duos were one point of entry, and I’m excited to see what I learn from the process of adding notes to K.515.

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Here's a messy draft of my embellishments for the slow movement of K.515, in case others are interested in seeing them or even trying them--or perhaps simply taking inspiration from these ideas and trying their own hands at writing different embellishments. These generally follow Mozart's melodic style as closely as possible. Of course, they’re still under construction. I’m sure they’ll change once rehearsals start in two weeks!

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jean dubuisson

January 21, 2025 at 12:46 PM · thank you very interesting!

Will Wilkin

January 21, 2025 at 03:07 PM · Thank you Dorian Bandy for this high-level discussion of embellishment in playing Mozart's music. By the time we get to Mozart, there had already been centuries of embellishment in music, such as divisions on a ground (variations on a theme, especially by dividing long notes into faster passages of shorter notes) and the passagio style such as in the Tratado de glosas of Diego Ortiz, published in 1553. No doubt there were earlier comparable practices, and I mention this because your discussion here seems to grow out of those traditions.

Obviously, the larger the ensemble, the less room there is for embellishments or flourish from individual players, so we are thinking about solo and other chamber music. These smaller ensembles can often be social occasions in a home, primarily for the pleasure of the players and maybe even no other audience at all. In such settings, and now I'm also moving back into the baroque, the score can be treated like a sketch rather than an inviolable scripture, and here there will be ornaments and cadenzas and other embellishments as the mood and skill of the players afford, hopefully within the appropriate style.

And now I've set up my question, which is that in the baroque sonatas these embellishments tend to be spontaneous, and might not be done the same way next time. But your Mozart examples are well-planned and notated, which seems quite different from spontaneity. And so I'm wondering how you might compare and contrast the relatively modern embellishments you describe with the looser earlier approach. It seems the purpose has changed, since the composed embellishments no longer eminate from impulses of the moment.

Dorian Bandy

January 22, 2025 at 04:46 AM · Thanks for the excellent and interesting question, Will!

I totally agree with everything you say about baroque embellishments. When I play anything pre-Mozart, my embellishments are fully improvised (and indeed, I improvise embellishments in Mozart's solo music as well). I know that this is true for other performers also. And I agree with you about the continuity of traditions.

But I think there are some important points that are specific to Mozart. It's true that we could in theory improvise embellishments in K.515 too--but when the goal is to imitate the style of a specific historical figure, improvising is risky, since not just "any" embellishments will do. In Mozart's case, we know a fair amount about his preferred style of embellishment, and I tried to craft these to conform to it as best I could. One can certainly learn to improvise in that style; but in a crowded and contrapuntally complex quintet, writing them in advance seemed the best way to adhere as closely as possible to his idiom.

The one thing I'd emphasize is that writing the embellishments beforehand isn't a just a modern-day practice. Mozart himself created model embellishments for publication, colleagues, and students; and his students wrote out embellishments of their own. You mention Ortiz; he wrote down embellishments too, and the massive tradition of notated embellishments for Corelli sonatas also comes to mind. Improvisation is certainly the goal, but writing embellishments down and then playing with them is a good first step, then and now!

Will Wilkin

January 22, 2025 at 02:05 PM · Thanks Dorian, I appreciate the discussion! One comment I'll offer on the Ortiz Tratado is it seems to me like a systematic catalog of many possible passaggi that could bridge various intervals. Something a student would range through just to get a feel for how to get from one note to another (often a cadence) with flourish. I've fooled around with that book a little but in my distractability haven't made serious study of it. But ultimately it seems a bag of tricks that could be pulled from in the spontaneity of a session.

Overall you're helping me to see there hasn't ever been a sharp line between planned (and notated) embellishments and spontaneous insertion of these devices, perhaps some personalities tended more towards writing them down whereas others might have simply rehearsed theirs and evolved them over repeated playings.

Another place in the Baroque where I detect this blurring between improvisation and notation is in certain opening movements of violin sonatas. To take a favorite example, one I hack around with out of love despite being not competent enough to let anyone else hear it, is the Biber sonata #5 in Em from his 1681 set. In my Kalmus score that first movement has no name, but on the CD case of the Romanesca (Andrew Manze) recording in parentheses it's called Praeludium. Such prelude-like sonata openings have an improvisational feel, some long notes interspersed with fast-as-possible scale runs, etc. Before I ever looked at a score, just listening to recordings, I was sure this was just the violinist warming up, but no, there it is, written down. Nonetheless, trying to read along while listening to 17th century sonatas, very often I'll hear things I'm not reading. In a simpler example, at the beginning of the 12th sonata from Isabella Leonarda's op. 16, my teacher has invited me to come in with a Dm scale before the first notated note (D!). Why not?, he says --the continuo is simply droning a single note anyway, I could noodle around in D as long as I want without upsetting the hands at the organ positive.

My final observation here, risky because I have no theoretical training so unqualified to offer analysis, is that these earlier sonatas are what I would term almost pre-melodic, hovering a lot in the harmonies of perfect intervals (before the piano ruined everything!), showing great style in slightly modified scale runs and arpeggios, etc (recalling Ortiz?), before the later composers brought melody itself to the fore. I'd further venture that melodic dominance of the music came to full force in romantic music, but already Mozart was presenting very beautiful melodies, which probably make embellishments more tricky because there are larger (melodic) structures that can't be violated or eclipsed.

Oliver Hees

January 24, 2025 at 06:46 AM · Very nice write-up and discussion. Writing up a cadenza and ornamentation for solo works (including cadenzas) is hard enough; balancing multiple voices in a quartet is truly a feat! Thanks for sharing some of the Mozart piano sonatas: the Rondo Alla Turca was a lovely, fresh take on a somewhat hackneyed piece. Some ornamentation and embellishments can feel a bit overboard for me, but it's fun to hear the variety that different performers can come up with on the same tune.

I'm curious: do you play much jazz? I don't really play jazz or any more improvisatory styles but I feel like there are a lot of parallels, often including written-out solos (although some won't like to admit it, haha), and requiring a good understanding of the underlying harmonies to pull off a convincing solo.

Dorian Bandy

January 25, 2025 at 10:06 PM · Hi again, Will! Here, too, I totally agree with the points you're making. You're right to call out the 17th-century violin tradition; at that point, there *really* wasn't a sharp line between notated composition and improvisation. I love those Andrew Manze recordings you mention; he does a particularly good job of making things sound improvisatory. And you're right to point out that some genres, like the Prelude, were primarily improvisatory. I would also add that this applied to genres we now think of as being "written" genres. Don't forget that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and many of their contemporaries and successors could fluently improvise fugues, or indeed entire sonatas!

And by the way, I agree with your teacher too! Why not enter with some noodling in that Leonarda sonata? I'd do the same!

I think your final observation is also great. It's true that things changed, especially around the end of the 18th century, with melody becoming more prominent and laden with musical significance. In fact, my guess is that this process was actually caused by all those habitual embellishers, whose virtuosic interventions would draw attention to melody, and that this then fed back into compositional styles. (I speculate about this at the very end of chapter 4 of my Mozart book.) One of my favorite phenomena in Mozart is that by the middle of the 1780s, he starts writing melodies that are literally nothing but strings of figures that previously existed as embellishment gestures. (Look at the opening solo of the Piano Concerto no. 22, for instance -- it's literally only turns and trills! And the same is true of many other gorgeous works as well, like (say) the slow movement of the Piano Trio K. 502.)

Dorian Bandy

January 25, 2025 at 10:10 PM · And thank you, too, Oliver! I don't play jazz myself, but I listen to it a lot, and I agree that there are so many conceptual overlaps! From what we can tell, Mozart (and virtually all his contemporaries) basically embellished and improvised by riffing on familiar chord progressions, and this remains how improvisers in other styles work, too. (In fact, some of the sources Will mentioned in the other comments--Ortiz, and I'd add Bovicelli, Rognoni, etc.--are essentially compendia of "licks" that can be absorbed into the hands and used when improvising solos, and some jazz technique books have very similar conceptual structures.) Great point!

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Embellishing Mozart’s C-major Quintet

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