FRANK MORANA
AmerOrganist 34/8

ed. Christoph Albrecht, Bärenreiter 8403. It is an

unfortunate fact of musical life that Mozart left behind

not a single completed written work for the organ. The

major works that are, today, categorized within the organ

rubric -- the two fantasies in F minor, K. 594 and K. 608,

and the Andante, K. 616 -- were intended for mechanical

execution by pin barrels and flue pipes. In the case of the

fantasies, these devices were part of a clockwork, and were

probably intended for installation in a mausoleum. The music,

therefore, needed bear no relation at all to idiomatic keyboard

writing, and it is, perhaps, this very feature that makes it

so irresistable to keyboard virtuosos. But for such players,

Mozart's four-staffed scores (as they appear in the

manuscripts and in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe) ought to pose

no problem, while a reduced score, as in such "practical"

editions as the present one, will probably only serve to

obscure the composer's intent. In the two fantasies,

Mozart's pitch-range never decends below tenor C, and there

is, originally, no differentiation between manuals and

pedals, since there are none in a pin-barreled organ. In

such "special cases," shouldn't any rearrangement involving

bass and pedal parts be left to the discretion of the

performer? Is it really valid to change Mozart's bass lines

into tenor lines, as at the ends of the Adagio sections in

K. 594? And shouldn't Mozart's basses generally be played

in their original registers, except perhaps for the addition

of 16-foot doubling? In both K. 594 and 608 (mm. 110

and 157, respectively), there are passages in which three

treble voices each hold long trills against a bass. In the

latter instance, the present edition retains all three

trills, but moves the bass note up an octave; in the former

instance, the bass is in the correct octave, but two of the

three trills are simply omitted. These may or may not be

acceptable performance solutions, but the inconsistency

should at least have been footnoted. Elsewhere, there are

many textual/textural changes, e.g., a double-third passage

for two pairs of voices in K. 594, mm. 76-77, is, here,

reworked into something altogether different. According to

the preface, since Mozart might well have been acquainted

with other, larger pin-barrelled organs at the time of

writing "it seemed logical [for the editor] to ignore the

lower limits of the original ambitus," and "to approach the

large pieces...on a large and differentiated dynamic

scale." But a more convincing rationale might simply be in

the desire to perpetuate Mozart's connection with the organ,

where in fact, no real repertoire exists. As much as Mozart

might have appreciated the potentialities of writing for a

large and fine instrument, there is little evidence that

that appreciation ever extended beyond the realm of

improvisation. If one is an organist, one needs to be

accept that our repertoire, rich as it is, lacks significant

contributions from many of the best composers, Haydn,

Beethoven, Schubert, as well as Mozart. In this light, one

can only view the remaining pieces in the collection as

artificial icing on an artificial cake. The Andante in F,

K. 616, is given on two staffs rather than Mozart's original

three, but this piece happens to lie more comfortably under

the fingers. The lower pitch-limit, to tenor F only, is

observed in this instance, but the dynamics are not

Mozart's. The Zwei kleine Fugen (Versetten),

K. 154a (Anhang 109 in the revised catalog), are manual

pieces of about a dozen measures each, which may or may not

have been written by Mozart. The Adagio in C for Glass

Harmonica, K. 356 (rev. K. 617a) is a unicum. The original

Armonica (invented by Benjamin Franklin) produces an

ethereal sound through water-filled glass pipes, which has

no like at the organ. This 3«-minute piece spans only two

octaves (from written middle C to high C), but is an

exquisite example of late-Mozart in his most touching and

unaffected manner. The unfinished Fugue in G minor, K. 401

(rev. K. 375e), for manual and pedals, may, at ninety-five

measures, have been just a few measures short of completion,

and Albrecht's written-out completion is a lot better than

the traditional one by Maximillian Stadler, notwithstanding

a slight modality problem at the very end. The last piece

in the collection is the only one not taken from the Neue

Mozart-Ausgabe IX/27/2.2. It is a completion by the editor

of an early sketch for the operatic chorale setting that

appears in Die Zauberflote. In the appendix to NMA IX/27,

there are additional fragments (including about a dozen

fugal fragments) in various states of completion, which

would have served to complete the documentary picture of

Mozart at the organ had they been included. These might not

necessarily be sketches, but rather, incipits of pieces that

may have fully existed in Mozart's mind, which were

"finished" improvisatorily, though we can probably never

know. In short, the present edition needs to be sharply

differentiated from NMA IX/27, especially since both are

published by Bärenreiter. The one belongs within the

category of great musical monuments; the other, within the

category of practical transcription-arrangements.