On 29 Dec 2004 at 16:44, Dean M. Estabrook wrote: > Very interesting ... I was unaware of the complex relationship between > composer/arr./orchestrator. Now I'm thinking, did any of the "Great" > composers farm out their work to orchestrators, e.g., Beethoven, > Mozart, etc..?
I'm unaware of any completed works of Mozart in which he did not do the orchestration. His method of writing was quite systematic, and based in Italian practice. He wrote first the bass line and the first violin, which, in the Italian style, was the top line of his orchestral score. He then filled in the orchestration in a second pass. Of course, sometimes he'd fill in some of the orchestration on the first pass, but this was basically the way it was done. It was so clear that the publisher Andr� printed a score of the overture to Don Giovanni that was in two colors of ink, black and red, that showed the two layers, with black being the first layer, red being the 2nd pass for orchestration. (it's actually a bit more complicated than that in the original MS, in that there seem to have been multiple pens used in the orchestration pass, to a lesser degree than in the original skeleton score, but it's still pretty clear that the was an initial full pass, then additional passes to fill in) The only case I can think of where Mozart had help (other than the complicated situation with the Requiem, which was obviously not his usual practice, since he generally didn't compose while dead) was in secco recitatives, not all of which he wrote. I believe that most of the secco recits in La Clemenza di Tito are not by Mozart, though they were, of course, considered by him to be satisfactory enough to have been used in performance. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
