Mozart Pianists: Walter Klein

When I first came up with the idea for Mozart in a Month, I knew when crucial element of the project would be listening to many different pianist's approaches to playing Mozart. I actually don't love how many people play Mozart. I often find many pianists approach him rather timidly, they smooth over articulation, dynamics, extremes, and generally in a feeble manner. His piano music is played so rarely with the fire, verve, and variety of character that we hear in his operas, symphonies, or even how we understand his own character and mannerisms to be like. 

But I want to keep an open mind and see what I can learn from all approaches to Mozart. My style won't 

convince everybody, and I dare say that my approach to the music will evolve over the next two years.

To begin with, though, I want to listen to a Mozart performer who I love. Walter Klein was not someone I knew, actually. As I started to collect lists of pianists who had recorded complete Mozart Piano Sonatas, his name came up and I started listening, and was hooked. There is so much in his approach to Mozart that I admire and want to recreate in my own way. His Mozart is full of extroverted characters, obvious phrasing, and colorful textures. To get a sense of this, I thought I would focus on the Sonata which I'm learning this month: #1, K 279 in C Major. 

You can hear nearly everything that I love in Klein's playing in the first few lines:

• M. 1: a strong forte to start
• M. 2: the eighth notes in the left hand are prominent, they're given an important role leading us forward. If this was a string quartet, and these notes the violist: our violist is allowed to be musical and expressive, whereas so often these notes are relegated to un-phrased background 
• M. 2 & 4: there's articulation in the right hand's 16th notes, you can especially hear the two-note slurs, especially in M. 2. We love to talk about singing at the piano, and of course Mozart should be vocal. But we have to remember that singers use vowels and consonants. Words can only be clearly communicated by annunciating consonants. These two-note slurs are the consonants, when so many other pianists play long uninterrupted vowels, which is meaningless. 
• M. 4-8: more articulation in the right hand. It's not soft-edged articulation, either. He lands on the appoggiatura in beat 3, and yet each of the appoggiaturas do not get the same emphasis. So not only is he articulating clear words, but not all the words are of equal importance.
• M. 4-8: left hand is not hidden. It doesn't overshadow the right hand melody, but it is no mere accompaniment. It has vibrant rhythmic energy, and it has shape in the harmonic line. Each harmonic chord is not equal. As my coach Louis Nagel says: your viola and cello went to conservatory too!
• M. 9 vs.M. 11: Consider these two measures. Exact same notes, vastly different atmospheres. Not only does he play the different articulations written, he exaggerates them, helping himself to some unwritten dynamic contrasts while using the damper pedal to reinforce the legato. 
• M. 12-16: I just need to draw attention to his left hand one last time. It does so many different things, and so he makes that apparent. The left hand plays such an important role in the musical drama. 

Overall, the thing I like about Walter Klein's Mozart playing is that he doesn't aim for delicate consistency. Many pianists underplay the variety that is in Mozart's scores, like they're apologizing. Klein does not. The first measure of the last system on the second page is quirky, the grace notes snappy and tempo rushing, before he returns to a melodic texture. Everything has shape and articulation, and those shapes are not even, smooth and rounded. 

The Development of the first movement does not have quite the variety I'd have expected. The sequential elements are often played with the same momentum, rather than each measure phrased internally, as well as having a specific role in the entire sequential shape. But perhaps this is intentional; he's letting the harmonies speak for themselves. It's like this Development section is no-man's-land, harmonic anarchy, and such phrasing would be out of place without a tonal hierarchy. After all, he makes much of the harmonic differences in the recapitulation, where even in the first theme (bottom of the 3rd page), Mozart is making creative changes. 

I've always found the second movement of this Sonata to be very awkward. The fortes and pianos seem rather arbitrarily placed (i.e. 3rd system, page 9), and many sections seem to disregard the time signature entirely (i.e. last two systems of page 9). But the phrasing taken by Klein makes the movement make sense. Nothing is very extreme here, the dynamics, nor the rubato. But he uses enough create phrases that have internal logic, and thus, the whole movement seems to make sense.

​The finale begins with a typical 4-measure phrase. The second phrase begins with the same thematic material, but ends up as a 6-measure phrase. Klein makes this phrase sound normal by playing M. 7-8 exactly the same, rather than cheapening the repeated measure with hackneyed trick like the echo effect.  M. 11-18, to contrast, is a typical 8 measure phrase, except it sounds uneven: Mozart fills these measures with nearly sequential material, except he always changes something: compare M. 13 and M. 15. Or take M. 12 and M. 14, which are sequential, vs. M. 16 which begins the same, but takes a new turn. In these instances, Klein plays up the subtle melodic shifts so that this typical phrase seems asymmetrical. Because his left hand is prominent, the extra quarter note on beat 2 of M. 16 makes the shifty composing unmistakable. Ignore left hands at your own peril!

Consider Klein's treatment of the repeated note motive in the second theme: measures 23, 25 and 27 each have repeated notes but each instance is treated differently in terms of dynamic and rhythmic drive. Nothing is monotonous, even though it looks monotonous on the page.  This, in short, is what I love about Walter Klein's Mozart playing. It's full of vitality and variety, and perfectly encapsulates the operatic elements that I wrote about on August 6th. 

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