JUPITER: Reading the 'Viennese Classics' in 19th-Century Britain'

Abstract

How were the concertos, symphonies and overtures of the so-called Viennese classics heard in London and in the British provinces in the half century after Mozart’s death? Somewhere between fully-scored performances that might sound recognisable in the first quarter of the twenty-first century and arrangements for two or four hands at a single keyboard sat a repertory of arrangements for fortepiano, flute, violin and cello. These arrangements are best known from the first print of Mozart’s last symphony to carry the name ‘Jupiter’, arranged and published by Clementi in 1823. The amount of music arranged for these forces, and their impact on Georgian and Victorian culture, was immense, and versions of works by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven for this ‘JUPITER’ ensemble appear to have been published only in London and to have dominated the British market. They constitute a fundamental canonic force in the first half of the 19th century.
JUPITER arrangements unsurprisingly afford a glimpse of how the pianists and arrangers Clementi, Cramer and Hummel viewed Mozart’s late piano concertos, for example, and how they may have played them. But they also reveal how such musicians attempted to reinscribe the sonorities they heard in symphonies from Haydn to Beethoven (only the latter’s eighth and ninth symphonies were not arranged in this way). Furthermore, the presence of two surviving arrangements of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 Op. 21 by Hummel and Giralomo Masi allows an examination of two competing readings of the same work in identical scorings. JUPITER arrangements take the modern ear inside the aural senses of some of the best known musicians in early 19th-century Europe.

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