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(a) Improvised embellishments.
Treatises affirm that competence in prepared or improvised embellishments is dependent on thorough knowledge of the basic types (‘Manieren’) and their execution. The sources give sample embellishments but cannot clarify what proportion was prepared and what was improvised in 18th-century practice, although they do show that there were discrepancies between original text and actual performance. Composers wrote out embellishments for the benefit of amateurs or students, who, unlike the composer or virtuosos, were not expected to have mastered the art of improvisation. Mosel (1813), following in the footsteps of Gluck, Leopold Mozart, Quantz and C.P.E. Bach, specifically mentioned Mozart as a composer who wrote out precisely the ornaments he desired. Bach (1753–62, p.165) warned:
many variants of melodies introduced by executants in the belief that they honour a piece, actually occurred to the composer, who, however, selected and wrote down the original because he considered it the best of its kind.
He elaborated his reservations elsewhere:
Today varied reprises are indispensable, being expected to every performer. A friend of mine takes every last pain to play pieces as written, purely and in accord with the rules of good performance. Can applause be rightfully denied him? Another, often driven by necessity, hides under bold variations his inability to express the notes as written. Nevertheless, the public holds him above the former. Performers want to vary every detail without stopping to ask whether such variation is permitted by their ability and the construction of the piece.
Often it is simply the varying, especially when it is allied with long and much too singularly decorated cadenzas, that elicits the loudest acclaim from the audience … Often these untimely variations are contrary to the construction, the affect, and the inner relationship of the ideas – an unpleasant matter for many composers. Assuming that the performer is capable of varying properly, is he always in the proper mood? Do not many new problems arise with unfamiliar works? Is not the most important consideration in varying, that the performer do honour to the piece? … Yet, regardless of these difficulties and abuses, good variation always retains its value.
The locus classicus of improvised instrumental ornamentation was the restatement of the principal theme, particularly in slow movements and rondos. Composers did not always notate such restatements, but signalled them in the manuscript with da capo signs. Thus the literal reprinting of the theme in modern editions creates an implication – not found in the sources – that the composer desired a note-for-note repetition of the opening music. Composers themselves often provided embellishments of principal themes immediately before performances by pupils or before publication. The differences between the texts Mozart used himself and those he presented to the general public may be seen by comparing autograph manuscripts and first editions of the second movement of the Piano Sonata in F k332/300k (ex.15) and the third movement of that in D k284/205b, variation xi. By the 1790s composers were writing elaborate embellishments into thematic reprises, having expropriated embellishment from the domain of improvisation (ex.16 shows an example by Beethoven).
Performers improvised embellishments mostly in works having a primary melodic line, for example solo piano works, duo sonatas with an obbligato instrument, string quartets with dominant first violin, chamber works for a wind instrument and strings, or instrumental concertos. Nonetheless, orchestral players of the 18th and early 19th centuries evidently improvised embellishments; indeed, in an account dated 19 December 1816 Louis Spohr decried an orchestral performance conducted by him in Rome that was constantly marred by untrammelled embellishment by individual members of the orchestra. Spohr remarked that he specifically forbade the players to make any additions to the music as printed, but acknowledged that ornamentation was second nature to them. He cited the horns as converting ex.17a into ex.17b and the clarinets as rendering (‘perhaps simultaneously’) ex.17c as ex.17d.
Mozart's piano concertos are a special case. Most of them were written for his personal use. In a number of them the solo part is occasionally notated in sketch-like shorthand. This occurs when melodic and rhythmic activity suddenly slacken without obvious dramatic or expressive motivation, such as slow-movement sequences (e.g. in the second movement of the concerto in C k503; ex.18); and also during ‘piano recitatives’ in the slow movements, in which a melody in the piano's right hand is accompanied by repeated quaver chords in the strings (e.g. in the concertos in D k451; D minor k466; C k467; C minor k491; D k537; and B k595). A surviving embellishment to the recitative from the second movement of k451 written out by Mozart for his sister Nannerl hints at his expectations for such passages (ex.19). Mozart also used such shorthand, for example long notes delineating outer boundaries, for arpeggiated or connective passage-work (e.g. in the concertos k451 in D, k482 in E, k595 in B and especially k491 in C minor). In such places the soloist's sudden reduction in rhythmic speed is not compensated for by activity in the orchestra. Suggestions for filling in the gaps appear in Badura-Skoda (1957), Neumann (1986) and the NMA scores of the concertos, which identify them as editorial (ex.20 shows a representative passage from the third movement of k482 in which suggested fill-ins by the NMA editors Hans Engel and Horst Heussner, by the Badura-Skodas and by Robert Levin, are shown above the autograph version).
The large leaps commonly found in dramatic arias of the period were often mimicked in instrumental music. Even in the 20th century treatises continued to warn against filling them in; but an extremely elaborate written-out embellishment to the second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto in A k488 in the hand of his pupil Barbara Ployer fills in such leaps. The content of the decoration hardly concords with Mozart's personal language, but it gives a useful indication of the quantity, if not the quality, of what Mozart provided in his own performances.
Given the direct relationship between individual works and specific performers and circumstances, a performer wishing to supply the most idiomatic embellishments will use the instrumental range observed by the composer (this precept also applies to cadenzas and lead-ins).
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