From Jan Swafford’s, The Reign of Love (2020) – Mozart and the Duo Sonata

Mozart’s Contribution to Violin Literature 

By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA, 2023-2024

Copyright, ©, Orion Music and Arts MA 2023-2024, 

All Rights Reserved

Mozart’s Duo Sonatas

Mozart composed some of the Classical period’s most exquisite works for violin.

Some of the greatest and most innovative among them are his violin and piano sonatas, conceived as duo sonatas, or work in which both violin and piano were seen and felt as musical equals in performative dialogue.

The composer and music historian Jan Swafford writes about them as being ‘conspicuously attractive’ works, and also of how some of them – like the E minor sonata – were also, in their way, singularities, and as works in minor keys where sunnier tonalities would have prevailed.

The music historian, composer, and biographer Jan Swafford describes the E minor sonata as ‘subtly fraught’, ‘full of lonely apprehension’, and a movement that follows a minuet of ‘dark hue’ – unusually – and as a ‘courtly dance made into something like a visualization of a heart ache’, also unusual for his day and time. 

As a collection, Mozart’s Violin and Piano sonatas also constitute some of the greatest works of violin duo sonata literature ever written in the Classical period.

FURTHER INFORMATION

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By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA, 2023-2024

Copyright, ©, Orion Music and Arts MA 2023-2024, 

All Rights Reserved

FOR PURCHASE

To purchase Jan Swafford’s Mozart biography, The Reign of Love, please click on the link here.