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Concertos of the Viennese School, c.1780-1810, and their Scoring  by Richard Maunder

£15.00

Published January 2018       ISBN 978 0 9528220 8 0

The concertos of Mozart and Beethoven are among the most popular works in the classical repertoire, familiar from countless performances and recordings. They can be ranked among the highest achievements of Western music. But these two supreme masters did not exist in isolation. To set their work in context, this book also examines the concertos of their many contemporaries in what might be termed the 'Viennese School': those who were resident in or visitors to Vienna, and those from elsewhere who were much influenced by the music being written in the Imperial capital. Of course, not all these concertos can be described as 'neglected masterpieces', but many of them are fine works that certainly deserve to be revived. In any case, each of them repays investigation for the evidence it can bring to bear on size and make-up of the ensembles which composers had in mind for their music. In this book, containing a very large number of music illustrations, Richard Maunder shows how orchestras for concertos in Vienna developed and gradually increased in size in the decades around the year 1800.

In Richard Maunder's previous books, The Scoring of Baroque Concertos and The Scoring of Early Classical Concertos, it was shown that most concertos of the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century were — in the modern sense of the term — chamber music, to be played one-to-a-part by a small group of musicians. Towards the end of the century numbers began to rise slowly: by the mid-1780s an ensemble with seven or eight strings had become fairly standard in Vienna, and Mozart apparently expected a dozen or so for his later piano concertos — as also did Beethoven. It was common practice, however, for the additional string players (known as 'ripienists') to take part only in the tuttis, leaving a lighter accompaniment in the solo passages.

Richard Maunder is a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. He has also published books on Mozart's Requiem and Keyboard Instruments in Eighteenth Century Vienna, as well as numerous editions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, including radical new versions of Mozart's Requiem and C minor Mass.

                 Paperback, 120 pages                               £15.00

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