V.com weekend vote: What cadenzas do you play - your own, or someone else's?
A "cadenza" is meant to be a fancy improvisation -- a way to show off a little -- that is done at certain cadences in a piece of music, such as a violin concerto.
This week, Nathan Cole wrote about his own experience, finally writing his own cadenza for the first movement of Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4 - after thinking about doing so for some 30 years!
Nathan Cole's notes - themes from Mozart 4, to help in writing a cadenza.
He is not alone - most violinists tend to learn cadenzas that were written by someone else, rather than improvising or writing the cadenzas for themselves. For the Mozart concertos, this most often means playing cadenzas written by Joseph Joachim, who lived some 200 years ago.
Of course, there are other alternatives to writing your own cadenza, or to playing one by Joachim. Many people have written cadenzas for the standard concertos. For example, when one of my students was studying Mozart Concerto No. 4, she chose to learn a cadenza written by Rachel Barton Pine. Many artists have written cadenzas - and those cadenzas exist in published form. For Mozart's fourth concerto alone, you can find cadenzas written by Eduard Herrmann, Sam Franko, Fritz Kreisler, Ferdinand David, Henri Marteau, Emile Sauret, Nathan Milstein, and Jascha Heifetz - as well as more modern musicians - Robert Levin, Maxim Vengerov, Nigel Kennedy, James Ehnes and Augustin Hadelich.
How about you? What are your thoughts on cadenzas in concertos? Have you learned the typical Joachim cadenzas? (In all honesty, that is what I play, at least in Mozart!) Have you learned any cadenzas that are off the beaten track, by artists who aren't necessarily the ones whose cadenzas are written into your edition?
And beyond that, has anyone written their own cadenzas? Nathan Cole was driving at this idea, offering a course for those who want to do so.
Please participate in the vote, and then share your thoughts about cadenzas. Which have you learned? Are you interested in others? Are you interested in writing your own? Have you actually written or performed your own?
You might also like:
- Have you ever performed your own music? A Mozart cadenza story
- Violinist.com interview with Rachel Barton Pine (writing cadenzas)
- Original Mozart Cadenzas Premiered at the Shanghai Competition
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Replies
I've recently written my first cadenza, for the first movement of the Hoffmeister viola concerto. It's also the only cadenza I've ever played, unless you count reading through the cadenzas provided in two different editions in preparation for writing my own. I will probably use that cadenza if I ever have a chance to perform the concerto.
For the most part I didn't follow a concerto sequence because I self-taught for a long time and switched to viola early. On violin I have learned a few intermediate violin concerti, and sight-read Mozart 3 several years ago as a means of getting used to the violin when I had to switch back to violin for a short time, but never really learned any violin concerto with an opportunity for a cadenza. On viola, I learned the Telemann concerto in 2005-06, but skipped Classical concerti entirely and the next concerto I started working on was the Walton in 2018. So my first opportunity to play a cadenza came much more recently, when I circled back to learn the Hoffmeister concerto.
As I mentioned in Nathan Cole’s blog, I have written many cadenzas and have also performed some of them. My upcoming recital in May will in include the TARTINI Devils Trill sonata with my own cadenza. Far be it for me to say that it is better than the iconic Kreisler cadenza but it is more thematic.
This is a fun question, Laurie! I actually performed a concerto as a soloist only once (Mozart in G major) and for that occasion I wrote my own cadenza and "Eingänge". For the concerti I studied for educational reasons, I played the traditional cadenzas: Joachim, Kreisler, Flesch, ...
I try several cadenzas, how do I get hold of Nats to try?
Mozart 3 G major: Sam Franko | 4 D Major and 5 A Major: Joachim | 1 in B Flat Major: Jean-Delphin Alard | 2 in D My Own; 6 and 7.....None tried.
Traditional Cadenzas have proven test of time. Sometimes we tried to show off so much, we forget the material offered by the composer. Some players play cadenzas that are longer than the movement they played, with technical passages that historically were not available........
Some include references to Paganini Caprices............. many a circus SHOW, not a musical one.....
I always reckoned kreisler to tbe the last word in cadenzas, until I accompanied Leonard Elschenbroich in the Haydn. His cadenza had me spellbound. It displayed not technical fireworks, but the depth and scope of expression that could be got out of the 'cello (He told me he "improvised it in the style", but I wonder whether the term "improvise" means the same to a German that it does to me).
I've only performed one concerto cadenza and, on that occasion, the choice was straightforward: The concerto concerned was a Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola by a certain Wolfgang Amadeus something-or-other!
If I were to perform a cadenza for something for which the composer had not written one, I'd probably write my own.
So far, not my own cadenzas, but the ones by well-known artists like Kreisler, Joachim, and Franko. There are others, but these three names come to mind right away.
I’ve made a number of my own improvisations in the last 10+ years. I put them together from bits and pieces of my own warm-up routines. They are cadenza-esque but not connected with any one composer’s piece(s). Instead, I can trace within them a blend of composer/pedagogue influences: Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Mazas, Kreutzer, for starters. As mentioned in replying to Nate’s blog, I haven’t yet written out any of them; but the ones I’ve come up with since 2018, I’ve committed to memory. So I could still play them, note for note, even if the audio tracks got wiped off my phone.
I haven’t learned any cadenzas that I’d call “off the beaten path.” Still, I‘m open to doing so. Even then, I don’t foresee performing them in the usual venues - like a recital room - mainly because of other schedule demands; but I’d be happy to play them in the garage - my place for sharing music with the public during warm weather.
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March 18, 2024 at 06:32 AM · I have only ever played one cadenza: for Mozart's E-Major adagio (one of his fragments, he never got around to compose the rest of the concerto). I even composed it myself. My teacher critiqued it mercilessly but I still played it. It was very short and began by directly establishing A-Major which was the error my teacher pointed out. I used to play it at weddings--the organist at the church was a friend of mine and he got me gigs when I was a student.
Generally I don't like cadenzas with the exception of Mendelssohn and Shostakovich #1. I always think they are too long. Even Kreisler's Beethoven cadenza takes too long until it finally arrives at its truly admirable section.
Consequently I never learned one. I studied only 6 concertos with opportunities for cadenzas which amounts to approximately 12 cadenzas I didn't waste time on learning. My teacher never made me learn them either. I think he was right. He knew I was going to be an amateur.