Ultimo aggiornamento17 febbraio 2025, alle 22:04

All roads lead to Mozart – Part I

di Nicola Giaquinto - 16 Gennaio 2025

Interview with Ivo Haag and Heidy Zimmermann

BASEL, SWITZERLAND

The circumstances under which this article came to be are rather unusual, but also a clear example of how music is a constant journey that never ceases to reward the curiosity of whom is willing to dig deeper and gain more insight.

I was spending the Christmas holidays in Calgary, when one morning I woke up to a message by a familiar face introducing me to a new interesting project. I had the chance to meet Swiss pianist Ivo Haag during my time at the Lucerne School of Music, where he is also a professor of piano. His message to me was about his upcoming performance (alongside his partner, Adrienne Soós)  of Mozart‘s Double Piano Concerto K365, with the inclusion of a rather unheard of cadenza written by Felix Mendelssohn – recently completed by none other than Dr. Robert Levin.

Seeing the genuine interest that the recently discovered new pieces by Mozart and Chopin sparked in both the worlds of musicologists and routine enjoyers of classical music alike, I decided to seize this opportunity and embark on a journey to better understand the sacrosanct legacy that the Salzburg composer left after his untimely death in 1791.

After months of planning I made my way to the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, to see the manuscript by Felix Mendelssohn and discuss its story it with both Ivo Haag and Heidy Zimmermann, curator of one of the largest classical music archives in the world.

N G: What is the Paul Sacher Stiftung?

H Z: Founded in 1986 by conductor and CEO of La-Roche Paul Sacher, the Paul Sacher Stiftung is an archive for music mostly written in the 20th and 21st century. His overwhelming support for music is made clear by 200 commissions of new works, which he performed with his orchestra, the Basler Kammerorchester.

Sacher’s main interest was to perform and organize concerts, blending old music with new music.

Sacher’s main interest was to perform and organize concerts, blending old music with new music, and after purchasing the estate of Igor Stravinsky in 1983, he decided to open a public archive. Today, we hold most of the scores written by Stravinsky, Béla Bartók and many important composers of the last century. Overall, more than 120 collections.

N G: What is your role here and when did you start?

H Z: I am a musicologist, and I have been working here for more than 20 years as a scholarly staff and archivist. I am personally responsible for some 25 collections and since I studied lots of old music I also became the curator of the older manuscripts.

N G: Rudolph Grumbacher offered his whole collection of autographs as a deposit to the archive of the Paul Sacher Stiftung. Who was he?

H Z: He was a German born banker who fled to Switzerland because of his Jewish heritage.

Although he had no experience playing any instrument, his passion for music was so great that he decided to start collecting autographs. Throughout his life he bought close to a thousand manuscripts, most from the 19th century and with a specific interest in Felix Mendelssohn.

N G: Why is that?

H Z: In a way he identified with him.  Grumbacher was a Jewish man married to a Christian woman. He always was very much interested in interreligious dialogue.

N G: What are some of the notable scores donated by Grumbacher?

H Z: He bought a Bach Cantata, lots of Mendelssohn’s letters, a famous Debussy’s instrumentation of Satie’s Gymnopedie and I think a few pages of La Mer.

After my conversation with Heidy Zimmermann I moved onto Ivo Haag, asking him some questions about this project and his piano duo.

N G: Ivo, tell me about your piano duo!

I H: The Klavierduo Soós-Haag is the stage name of the piano duo formed by me and my wife.

Over the years, we have taken part in several projects in different fields such as the complete recording of Brahms‘ symphonies in the composer’s original versions for both piano four hands and two pianos. On our website there is the complete discography with details. I would say that we are known for rarely played repertoire, discoveries such as the four-hand sonatas by Moscheles or the works of the very early Debussy (recorded by Naxos) or indeed the cadenzas of Mendelssohn. We gave the first performance of Péter Eötvös‘ concerto for two pianos in Biel. Dieter Ammann, Krzysztof Meyer, Rudolf Kelterborn and others have written works for us.

We are in love with Schubert‘s music and organized a complete performance of Schubert’s works for four hands at the Künstlerhaus die Boswil with the duo Tal & Groethuysen and the duo Grau Schumacher (both German) and later two other piano duo festivals.

N G: How did the work around this Mozart cadenza originate?  

I H: It all began after I started reading the complete edition of Mendelssohn’s letters. In one dated June 1st, 1832, he wrote to his father about an upcoming performance of Mozart’s Double Concerto K365 with Ignaz Moscheles, for which he had allegedly written two big cadenzas.

My first question was “why do I not know these cadenzas?”. I started to do some research, but I could only find a brief mention of this cadenza in an article by Larry Todd, dealing with the relationship between Mozart and Mendelssohn.

After being in contact with the Felix Mendelssohn Archive in Leipzig I was redirected here in Basel, where I was told that one of the manuscripts was (the other one is in Leeds). The particularity of this cadenza is that only the part that Mendelssohn wrote for himself is notated, whereas Moscheles’ was left blank for his improvisation.

N G: What was the process of completing the cadenza like?

I H: I met Robert Levin in Bern, and I thought to myself that if there was anyone able to reconstruct this cadenza and, in a way, “invent” what was not there, it would have been him.

After meeting me and discussing the project he happily agreed to complete both the cadenzas from the first and the third movement (the latter being lost). Which he did in December 2023, just in time for our performance. We ultimately toured the concerto with the new cadenza in four cities with violinist and conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy and the CHAARTS Chamber Artists in 2024.

H Z: The manuscripts for these cadenzas stayed in Moscheles’ estate until 1977, year in which they were sold to Grunbacher at an auction in London. Basel is quite a goldmine for music collection. Among the four big collectors that called this city home during the 20thcentury was also Arthur Wilhelm, who personally owned the manuscripts of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the Piano Trios by Brahms, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and the last three piano Sonatas by Schubert.

N G: Have you ever played this concerto before as a duo in the past? What cadenza did you play?

I H: Yes, many times. But we always performed the original cadenza written by Mozart.

N G: Do you feel like this cadenza completed by Mendelssohn feels like Mozart or does it have some Mendelssohnian elements?

I H: Mendelssohn was an extremely cultured man with a very intelligent sense of style. This cadenza did get very close to Mozart, but somehow one can still feel that it is a child of the 19th century.

Nevertheless, it is done with a lot of taste and musical knowledge. If you compare it to other Mozart cadenzas by other composers of the time this one really stands out. Both the orchestra and the conductor thought of it as equal to the Mozart cadenza in terms of beauty and structural integrity.

N G: After all, Mendelssohn was one of those composers who knew the ins and outs of composition…

While he certainly was not the inventor of it, he really helped paving the way for historically informed performances.

I H: Yes, he had a great sense of style and history. One should never forget the direct connection that he had to Bach.  Mendelssohn’s own aunt was a pupil of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach.

This does not necessarily put him closer to Mozart in this case, but it showcases his underlying sense of history and tradition. While he certainly was not the inventor of it, he really helped paving the way for historically informed performances.

N G: Was the audience aware that these cadenzas were performed?

I H: Of course. We introduced every concert with a speech announcing that we were going to perform a piece that had not been heard for the past 200 years!

N G: Do you think that, in a way, this performance made the audience feel the thrill of a never-before heard cadenza?

I H: You will have to ask the audience, but I think they appreciated! I was personally very enthusiastic, both by the work done by Dr. Levin and the performance.

You can hear the performance (including the new cadenza) by Haag and Soós in this video recorded during their performance in Liestal, January 2024.

After thanking and saying goodbye to both Ivo Haag and Heidy Zimmermann, I made my way to Salzburg to interview Dr. Robert Levin.

Nicola Giaquinto

Autore

Sammarinese e pianista per scherzo del destino. Appassionato di musica francese, cucina e neuroscienze… tutte cose che col passare del tempo mi stanno rendendo sempre più radical chic e incapace di intrattenere rapporti umani.

I miei successi più grandi sono aver imparato l’opera omnia di Ravel e aver preparato la piadina senza glutine.

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