All roads lead to Mozart – Part II
di Nicola Giaquinto - 27 Gennaio 2025
A conversation with Robert Levin
SALZBURG, AUSTRIA
What do Napoleon Bonaparte, Leonardo da Vinci and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart have in common? The answer is quite simple: they helped shape the world as we know it today, so much so that it is virtually impossible not to know who they were.
While only a small minority of people will be able to fully grasp the strategic details of the Battle of Austerlitz, appreciate the exquisite chiaroscuro in the Lady with an Ermine or decipher the contrapuntal cathedral in the last movement of the Jupiter Symphony, the truth of the matter is that they (among many others) were able to leave a permanent mark on the social and cultural fabric of Western history. There is no recipe of human qualities necessary to achieve greatness, no blueprint to effortlessness in one’s craft, but retracing the steps of these great figures can help finding out how exactly they managed to stand the test of time.
Whether you know the ins and outs of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s catalogue, or you unknowingly listened to one of his famous pieces while inside of an elevator, there is no doubt that at some point you came into contact with his music. Only a few people, though, got as close to the truth behind the Austrian composer’s work as much as Robert Levin did.

Pianist Robert Levin has been heard throughout the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. His solo engagements include the orchestras of Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Montreal, Philadelphia, Toronto, Utah and Vienna on the Steinway with such conductors as Semyon Bychkov, James Conlon, Bernard Haitink, Sir Neville Marriner, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen. On period pianos he has appeared with the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists, the Handel & Haydn Society, the London Classical Players, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood, Ton Koopman, Emmanuel Krivine, Sir Charles Mackerras, Nicholas McGegan, and Sir Roger Norrington.
Renowned for his improvised embellishments and cadenzas in Classical period repertoire, Robert Levin has made recordings for AAM, Bridge, DG Archiv, CRI, Decca/London, Deutsche Grammophon, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, ECM, Hyperion, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Le Palais des Dégustateurs, New York Philomusica, Nonesuch, Philips and SONY Classical.
These include the complete Mozart works for keyboard and orchestra for Decca Oiseau Lyre and AAM with Christopher Hogwood, Richard Egarr, Bojan Čičič, Laurence Cummings, Ya-Fei Chuang, Louise Alder, and the Academy of Ancient Music; a Beethoven concerto cycle for DG Archiv with John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (including the world premiere recording of Beethoven’s arrangement of the Fourth Concerto for piano and string quintet); and the complete Bach harpsichord concertos with Helmuth Rilling as well as the six English Suites (on piano) and both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier (on five keyboard instruments) as part of Hänssler’s 172-CD Edition Bachakademie. His recording of the complete piano music of Henri Dutilleux was issued by ECM in 2009.
A passionate advocate of new music, he has commissioned and premiered a large number of works, including Joshua Fineberg’s Veils (2001), John Harbison’s Second Sonata (2003), Yehudi Wyner’s piano concerto Chiavi in mano (Pulitzer Prize, 2006), Bernard Rands’ Preludes (2007), Thomas Oboe Lee’s Piano Concerto (2007), Hans Peter Türk’s Träume (2014), and Yehudi Wyner’s Duo Concertino for viola, piano, and string orchestra (with Kim Kashkashian). Bridge Records released a CD that includes his performances of Bernard Rands’ Preludes and First Impromptu, and Hyperion has issued the complete Beethoven sonatas and variations for piano and cello with Steven Isserlis.
He has recorded his own completions of Mozart’s unfinished works for piano and violin with Gérard Poulet, the six Bach Partitas on piano (Grand Prix International du Disque) and the complete Schubert Piano trios with violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley and cellist Peter Wiley for Le Palais des Dégustateurs. His recording of the complete Mozart Piano sonatas on Mozart’s piano (Diapason d’Or de l‘Année) has been released by ECM.

Robert Levin’s active career as a chamber musician includes a long association with the violist Kim Kashkashian and regular appearances with cellist Steven Isserlis. He performs frequently with his wife, pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, in duo recitals and with orchestra. From 2007 to 2016 he was Artistic Director of the Sarasota Music Festival, where he has been an artist faculty member since 1979.
Our two-hour conversation can only be described as an outpour of knowledge, wisdom and a sprinkle of Mozartian wit by an artist who dedicated his whole life to the pursuit of the true essence behind the notes.
In addition to his performing activities, Robert Levin is a noted theorist and musicologist and is the author of a number of articles and essays on Mozart. A member of the Akademie für Mozartforschung, his completions of Mozart fragments are published by Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Henle, Carus, Peters, and Wiener Urtext Edition, and recorded and performed throughout the world.
His completion of the Mozart Requiem stands together with that of Mozart’s assistant Franz Xaver Süssmayr as the standard version, and his completion of the Mozart C-minor mass, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, was premiered there in January 2005 and has since been recorded and widely performed.
Robert Levin was President of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition (Leipzig, Germany) from 2002-2024. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the Bach Medal of the City of Leipzig in 2018 and the Golden Mozart Medal from the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg in 2024.
From 1993 to 2013 he was the Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and is presently Visiting Professor at The Juilliard School, International Chair at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and Adjunct Professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg.
After interviewing Ivo Haag and Heidy Zimmermann in Basel I made my way to Salzburg, where I met Robert Levin to discuss Mozart, Mendelssohn and the practice of improvisation. Our two-hour conversation can only be described as an outpour of knowledge, wisdom and a sprinkle of Mozartian wit by an artist who dedicated his whole life to the pursuit of the true essence behind the notes.

N G: You are known as one of the most important Mozart scholars today, how did you discover this music?
R L: The household in which I grew up was one very typical of middle-class America in the 1950s, which is to say a great love for theater, literature and music. As an only child, I was used to going to Carnegie Hall with my parents, hearing Richter, Gilels, Serkin, Horowitz, the New York Philharmonic and so on.
My relationship with Mozart really stems from the great love that my father had for him before me. He was a dental ceramist with a great passion for music… he owned 150 Mozart albums before I even knew anything about music.
N G: One of your most notable skills is your ability to improvise in the style of Mozart. How did you learn to do so?
R L: After five years studying with Nadia Boulanger in Fontainebleau and Paris I went to Harvard, and during my time there I took a summer course in conducting held by Hans Swarowsky, a seriously intellectually oriented conductor. At one point, one of our conversations on Mozart’s Piano Concertos went a little bit like this:
Swarovsky said:
“If you want to play Mozart’s Concerto the way the composer intended them, you need to improvise”
Completely baffled, I answered:
“I don’t know anybody who improvises on Mozart’s Concertos”
His response was:
“Evidently you are not familiar with the work of Frierich Gulda. I made a recording of the K467 and the K595, find the disc, listen to it, imitate it”
After this I went to a local store in Nice, bought the disc and brought it back to New York. I was thunderstruck upon first hearing.
Never in my life had I heard anyone play Mozart the way Gulda did: decorations all over the place and improvised cadenzas… I thought to myself that I really wanted to be able to do that.
The only person I could have studied with for that matter would have been Gulda himself, but at the time I was an undergraduate at Harvard and the Vietnam war was raging. If I were to ask for a leave of absence I would have been drafted into the army, which was obviously not an option.
The work that I had done with Nadia Boulanger gave me a tool kit of anything that I might need, regardless of what I became as a musician.
The work that I had done with Nadia Boulanger gave me a tool kit of anything that I might need, regardless of what I became as a musician. She really provided me with a complete range of disciplinary and artistic perspectives and the keyboard harmony I studied with her was an important basis for trying to learn how to do this. With this in mind I concluded that I could have taught myself how to do it by looking at Mozart’s scores and listening to performances by Gulda and other pianists.
Another intervening factor happened when one of my fellow students at Harvard approached me, asking:
“I am going to conduct a performance of the Mozart Requiem; how would you like to play the organ?”
I replied:
“Well, that would be fantastic, a chance of a lifetime.”
Then he added:
“I have the new Mozart Edition of the Requiem and in the back of the score there is a sketch that he seems to have intended to finish the Lacrymosa. I know you are rather interested in Mozart, why don’t you attempt to complete this fugue so that we can incorporate it into the performance? “
I stared at him, and said:
“You must be mad! There are much easier ways to make a complete fool of oneself than to do something like that!”
He responded:
“Don’t say no so quickly… just think about it!”
At that point, I thought that in order to learn how to improvise in the style of Mozart I should have first learnt how to compose in the style of Mozart… if you want to run you have to be able to walk first.
N G: Did you complete the Requiem? What happened after?
R L: Yes, I did. After the completion and performance of the Requiem I got very interested in the whole question of “unfinished Mozart”.
We know he did not finish the Requiem because he died, but I started asking myself if there were other pieces by Mozart that were unfinished, and what that might have had to say about his creative process. After a little bit of digging, I discovered that there was no western composer of value that had left a larger number of fragments than Mozart. When you look at these more than 140 musical torsos you see that most of them are of very high quality… some even higher than the pieces he finished.
At this time, I was going to major in French at Harvard because of my time in France working with Nadia Boulanger. However, when I became aware of this aspect of Mozart’s creative process, I decided to transfer to the music department and write my senior thesis on his unfinished works, rather than Charles Baudelaire.
For my senior year recital I enlisted the services of American composer John Harbison and his extraordinary violinist wife Rosemary. My thesis took three representative works of Mozart that were unfinished. I went to Europe, studied the original manuscripts, did the completions and later unveiled them for the audience.
N G: What pieces were they?
R L: A Double Concerto for piano, violin and orchestra from Mannheim in 1778, an unfinished Clarinet Quintet in B flat Major, probably from the last year of Mozart’s life, and the “Amen” fugue to the Requeim. These were the pieces I got started with.
The review that Michael Steinberg, chief critic of the Boston Globe at the time, wrote about the concert got the attention of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As a matter of fact, after the request of Michel Sasson, I completed the Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and cello and an Oboe Concerto for one of their concert series.
One thing led to another, I ultimately went to Kassel, Germany to meet the two editors and chief of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe at Bärenreiter (Wolfgang Rehm and Wolfgang Plath) to see if they would have been interested in publishing my completions, which they later did. That is what launched me into this career of finishing Mozart.

N G: Mozart is a universally enjoyed composer, what does an expert like Robert Levin find striking about his music?
R L: First of all, the music is of an unparalleled cosmopolitan elegance. Mozart became acquainted with music in Italy, France, Germany and England, hearing different styles by other composers and making them his own, sometimes improving on them.
There is an extreme sense of satisfaction about Mozart’s music. His writing has an extraordinary consistency of proportions, which means that he manages to communicate in the most natural and balanced of ways.
It is a kind of a magic mirror that reflects the music of his time, making it more personal. He has an uncanny ability to write music of great naturalness and exquisite balance. When you hear a piece of him you are overcome by a certain poise, everything happens as you would hope… except better! There is an extreme sense of satisfaction about Mozart’s music. His writing has an extraordinary consistency of proportions, which means that he manages to communicate in the most natural and balanced of ways.
N G: What do we know about Mozart’s playing?
R L: We have accounts of his touch and his articulation. Ironically enough, in the Konversationshefte Beethoven says Mozart’s playing is rather choppy. If you think about it, this is not entirely impossible since the style of performance is always evolving.
Legato was hailed as the central way to play in the 19th century, whereas rhetoric and diction were more important during the baroque and classical era. We can summarize the playing style of Mozart by quoting Malcom Bilson:
“In the 18th century music spoke, in the 19th century it sang”
Mozart’s performance style does indeed speak. Consonants are just as important as vowels, and that is equally as true whether you are singing an opera aria or playing the piano. When Bilson invited me to join him in doing some recordings on the fortepiano, I became familiar with this aspect of Mozart’s performance style.
N G: You recently recorded the entirety of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas on the composer’s own piano with embellished repeats. How much of this is spontaneous and risk based, how much is partly structured?
R L: Improvisation is impossible without risk. You cannot be afraid of messing up because you can never know what is going to happen. The problem is the constant horse race going on between your brain and your fingers. If one gets too far ahead of the other, there is going to be a calamity!
In the case of the Mozart Sonatas recording, it was important for me to have people understand that the identity of a piece of music does not reside in playing literally what is on the page.
Besides, the question of creativity is complicated. Let’s take for example his Sonata in C Major K333.
The deceptive cadence leading into the last three chords of the last movement (bars 168-169) is absolutely delightful, but not so much the second time around, since you already know what is going to happen. That might be an argument in favor of delaying the deceptive cadence until the second time.
In the A minor Sonata K310, written in Paris upon the death of his mother, towards the end of the recapitulation, he interrupts the phrase with a devastating cascade of diminished sevenths (bars 126-127) . To hear it that way twice is rather questionable; it would have a different narrative effect to remove those three bars and save them for the second time. No one knows the truth, but that might be what he meant.
The origin of the notion of varying repeats comes from Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, in particular his three sets of Sonatas with Varied Reprises (1759). I was very fortunate to be asked to work on an edition of these sonatas right before I went into the recording studio. After doing some research I discovered that these very sonatas by C.P.E Bach were in the Mozart family library, so there is nothing speculative about linking the playing style of the two composers.
N G: When did the practice of improvisation start to dim out?
R L: When we try to understand the evolution of the relationship between composer and improvisation, Beethoven is our man.
When he played his first four piano concerti he improvised – as the celebrated improviser that he was – but when it came to the Emperor Concerto it was already clear to him that he was not going to be able to perform the premiere due to his loss of hearing. It seems to me that he must have made the decision to not allow anyone else to play a cadenza, since he himself could not, which is proved by the score when he writes “non si fa una Cadenza, ma s’attacca subito il seguente” (bar 496, 1st movement). Notice how he implies to not improvise a cadenza (from “fare” in Italian). From this point on, cadenzas were composed.
N G: Do you think that this loss of improvisation caused music to become a little too standardized?
R L: Most definitely…and I am on record for saying so.
N G: Is improvisation in an orchestral context any different?
R L: If you have imaginative players in the orchestra, they may respond to it. For instance, over the years spent working with the Academy of Ancient Music, the wind players started getting more creative. You can hear in our last five recordings, where there is quite a bit of decoration coming from the woodwinds in response to what I am doing. In general, there is not much of a difference… sometimes conductors just get a little more nervous!
N G: Can you run me through the process of constructing a Mozart cadenza? How do you give structure to something so improvisatory?
R L: You must have a template, a basic structure that you can derive by looking at Mozart’s original cadenzas. It is a fairly conventional approach; a typical cadenza is somewhere between the length of the development section or 1/10 of the overall length of the movement: if a first movement is 380 bars long, then somewhere between 30-40 bars would be the maximum length of a cadenza.
When the orchestra starts its run to the 6/4 chord, I think: “What am I going to start with?” and hope to figure something out in the eight or ten bars I have… then the horse race between head and fingers begins and I try to maintain the balance of this fevered sense of coherence. In general, one must play by Mozart’s rules. Discipline and imagination are playing a constant game with one another. I am in the peculiar situation of having played Mozart’s Concertos many more times that he ever did, so I have a harder time because I am always trying to not repeat myself.

N G: How much material did you have when completing the cadenza commissioned by Ivo Haag?
R L: What is interesting about that specific cadenza is that Mendelssohn composes his solo in its entirety, while in the part reserved to Moscheles he writes “Here, Moscheles improvises”. It is possible that Mendelssohn felt like he needed more security.
To complete the cadenza we made use of two main aspects:
- We looked at the entirety of the cadenza to see what material from the concerto was used for the written part (Mendelssohn’s cadenza). It is very possible that the unused material could have been used by Moscheles.
- We examined the length of Mendelssohn’s part, which was used to calibrate Moscheles’ in order to have a sense of proportion.
N G: What was the most challenging part of completing the cadenza?
R L: The most challenging thing to me was writing a piece with material by Mozart in the musical style of Mendelssohn. I did not want to write something too close to the style of Mozart, the details of construction of the piece definitely suggested early romanticism, not Viennese classicism.
N G: What about working on manuscripts? Do you find it difficult?
R L: When you work with autographs you have to understand what the notational conventions of a particular composer are. For instance, when you look at a Mozart manuscript you can see things he took for granted that we are not necessarily trained to do, such as:
- Mozart breaks slurs at the end of a line or the end of a page. One can see this when bars are slurred in pairs, but at the end of a line or page there are two one-bar slurs instead of one 2-bar one. (See K. 452, last movement, keyboard left hand, c-minor section modulating back to E-flat major.)
- Mozart breaks slurs when there is a change in stemming/beaming. A parallel passage will often confirm this.
N G: We know that Mendessohn was an extremely intelligent man. Do you think he was aware of the performance practices of Mozart’s times?
R L: To some extent. I would not exaggerate, because people are always evolving. Mendelssohn surely owes a lot to Mozart, but he still is his own person.
N G: Do you think that this cadenza written by Mendelssohn is closer to the early 19th century in terms of style?
R L: Certainly. I will quote one example.
Mendelssohn, as Mozart often does, begins the cadenza with the principal theme of the first movement, but if you follow the piece onwards you will notice how he quotes it a second time. Mozart would have never done such a thing.
N G: Would you be able to guess where Mozart’s music could have gone, had he lived longer?
R L: The direction of Mozart is not entirely speculative, mostly thanks to the 140 fragments I mentioned earlier.
When Alan Tyson did his census of the paper that Mozart used to write these fragments on he was able to show that some of the most famous and most beloved pieces by the composer were actually fragments that laid on his writing desk for as much as ten years. There is a lot of material that he would have been more likely to engage in.
You can get a sense of where he is going by listening to his late music. There are moments in the Prague Symphony, the Jupiter Symphony and the Munich Kyrie where you hear a harmonic language that is quite forward-looking. Although, this interest in a more alienating harmonic language started a lot earlier. On the other hand, if Mozart had lived as long as Haydn did, he would have died in 1833. It is really hard to imagine what he could have written had he come in contact with Wagner, Schumann and Liszt.