Satisfying my sustained curiosity about the compositions of Leopold Koželuh (1747–1818) has, until now, been impeded by the extreme selectivity of modern editions. Leopold Koželuh: Pět Sonát (Prague: Supraphon, 1984) includes only five of an approximate total of fifty keyboard sonatas, for instance. The launching of this complete edition in four volumes is therefore extremely welcome. The first volume, under review here, contains twelve sonatas composed in 1780–1784, following the composer's move to Vienna in 1778.
Koželuh's initial success as a composer of symphonies, concertos, stage works, chamber music and music for keyboard was considerable, but his reputation had declined even before the end of his life. Hogwood attributes this to Koželuh's conscious (and exclusive) tailoring of his keyboard output to the demands of the amateur market: initially hailed as pleasing, tasteful, restrained and fashionable, ‘the polished paragraphs of Koželuh did not measure up to the frenzy required for a creature of the nineteenth century’ (viii). Somewhat inauspiciously, Hogwood describes the keyboard sonatas as representing ‘the “norm” of Classical Viennese style against which we can measure the exceptions’ (ix), echoing Charles Rosen's ‘anonymous style’ or ‘musical vernacular’ against which the ‘great’ works of the period are customarily defined (The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (London: Faber, 1971), 22). Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, the Koželuh literature has remained small; it includes a life-and-works study with thematic catalogue (Milan Poštolka, Leopold Koželuch: Život a Dílo (Prague: Státní Hudební Vydavatelství, 1964)) and two PhD dissertations (Christa Flamm, ‘Leopold Koželuch: Biographie und stilkritische Untersuchung der Sonaten für Klavier, Violine und Violoncello nebst einem Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Klaviertrios’ (Universität Wien, 1968), and Gertrud Löbl, ‘Die Klaviersonate bei Leopold Koželuch’ (Universität Wien, 1937)).
The thoroughness of this volume is commendable. It boasts a nineteen-page Critical Commentary and a ten-page Introduction. The latter (given in English, Czech and German), delivered in a lucid prose style and undergirded by an impressive array of secondary sources, surveys Koželuh's style and reception, and outlines Hogwood's policies of ordering and selection. Various factors, including the unavailability of autographs, have complicated the task of establishing the correct number of keyboard sonatas and assembling a chronology; Hogwood organizes the edition by publication date and groups the sonatas according to Koželuh's opus numbers. The only thing missing from this Introduction is the more positive (or, dare one suggest, enthusiastic) appraisal of the sonatas that would have stimulated one's appetite for the works to follow. Hogwood's reluctance to enter into any sort of special pleading is understandable, but he does place great weight on the ‘pleasing but unchallenging’ view of the sonatas, doubling back in the third section on his already comprehensive coverage of this in the second (ix–x).
My initial curiosity about the sonatas ebbed whilst reading the Introduction, it must be said, but was revived by playing them through: the undeniable conservatism of the idiom by no means divests them of subtle qualities of interest and individuality. Hogwood observes Koželuh's ‘speciality of extended cantabile slow movements’ (ix). In the reprise of the second movement of the Sonata in D major Op. 1 No. 3 the skilful management of melodic contour and careful regulation of relative cadential strength achieve an impressive sense of breadth and continuity. An elegant, Mozartean sequence (bars 59–60) is followed with a cadence whose resolution is mitigated by the continuing dominant pedal. A second tonic cadence is sidestepped by an interrupted progression, and when a tonic cadence finally occurs it is followed by a link into the rondo finale. Koželuh employs the open-ended slow movement several times in this initial set of sonatas. Even more memorable is Op. 2 No. 3 in C minor, with its fantasia-like alternation of slow and fast sections. The opening Largo, repeated at the end of the first movement, calls to mind Mozart's Fantasia k475 of 1784, written just four years later. Hogwood might also have commented on the discrepancy between the ‘normality’ of Koželuh's keyboard sonatas and the sophistication, calculated strangeness and even sensationalism of works like the Symphony in B flat major, subtitled L'irresoluto. A recitative-like passage pervades both outer movements (making this an unusually early example of explicit cyclic interconnection) and makes the endings of both seem disconcertingly perfunctory. In both of its main incarnations the recitative is accompanied by spooky tremolo strings in D flat major.
Hogwood does make some useful attempts to portray the physiognomy of these unfamiliar sonatas. He mentions ‘hints of the Czech pastorella’ and a ‘partiality for the flattened sub-mediant shift, which today evokes memories of Schubert’ (ix). The sonatas in the first volume contain shifts to several flat-side centres: the first movement of Op. 1 No. 1 in F major has a stretch in A flat major (the flattened mediant). Then there is the foray into E flat major in the first movement of Op. 5 (La chasse) (bars 97–107): E flat is approached from a unison G and followed by a convoluted transition to D minor emphasizing D flat major (bars 115–118). Czech compatriot Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812) was a more contemporaneous purveyor of this kind of harmonic effect than Schubert. A similar shift from G to E flat major occurs in the recapitulation of the first movement of his Sonata in G major Op. 35 No. 2, dating from the year of Schubert's birth. In fact, some comparison of Koželuh with Dussek might have been in order, particularly given both composers' cultivation of expressive lyricism, though any comparisons would reveal more differences than similarities. Koželuh's sonatas are technically much less demanding than Dussek's, and the latter's interaction with English pianos led to fuller, denser keyboard textures. Dussek also adopted the ‘two-tiered’ approach to the marketplace that Koželuh eschewed, composing keyboard works for both the amateur and professional spheres. Koželuh obviously saved his more enterprising and daring experiments for works in ‘larger’ genres.
Apart from crowding too many systems onto a page, the presentation of this volume is prepossessing and sustains a scholarly air. Many of the sonatas are illustrated by facsimiles, taken from manuscript copies or early editions. Hogwood accompanies the manuscript copy (1797) of an excerpt from the Sonata in A major Op. 2 No. 2 with some notes about the omission of dynamics, unusual placement of ornament signs and the like. The manuscript copy of the second movement of the Sonata in F major Op. 8 No. 2 shows dots and dashes ‘unique to this source’ (page [131]). These facsimiles are thus not merely cosmetic: they provide windows onto the editorial process and offer practical demonstrations of some of the issues of editorial policy discussed in the Introduction.
Dots and dashes – their geographical variability, their inconsistent application by contemporary engravers and the consequent problem of distinguishing between the two in performance – are one of those editorial issues discussed substantially. Hogwood suggests that Mozart's approach, whereby ‘the dot was … the true short staccato, but with the dash he made more of the act of release’, may be applicable to Koželuh; but there are nevertheless slightly later sources that ‘describe the dash as a shorter staccato than the dot’, plus the additional possibility that the dash was simply to ‘indicate the end of a phrase’ (xiii). Hogwood usefully distinguishes deviations from secondary sources with round brackets but ultimately remains non-committal about the ideal treatment of dots and dashes in Koželuh's sonatas. He follows the composer in omitting simile articulations, leaving these ‘to the initiative of the player’ (xiv). In bars 122–130 of the first movement of the Sonata in B flat major Op. 2 No. 1, which starts off with dashed quavers, ‘it would be misleading to add simile articulation’ throughout the passage because ‘many options between portato (Tragen) and full staccato would be possible according to taste’ (xiv). Allowing this sort of latitude for the performer's ‘taste’ may be the best approach to the vagaries of eighteenth-century performance and editorial practice. On the other hand, it does create the danger that a performer uncommitted to (or relatively ignorant of) the possibilities of passages like bars 122–130 of Op. 2 No. 1 will, in the absence of editorial guidance, lapse into indifference or something inappropriate.
Other aspects of editorial policy are less inherently contentious. Cautionary accidentals are inserted in small type, which is preferable to fussy brackets. (I detected only one error: a rogue C♭ in bar 126 of the first movement of Op. 8 No. 2.) Hogwood's assertion about mezza voce in relation to a sonata in a later volume is historically dubious: ‘Of [Koželuh's] other expressive terms, only the term mezza voce, first found in Sonata 21, is unusual; prior to Beethoven's use of it in the slow movements of his late piano sonatas and quartets it was primarily an instruction for singers and string players’ (xiv). Hogwood presumably has in mind examples like the ‘Una corda mezza voce’ in the slow movement of Beethoven's ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata (1817–1818). Mezza voce is, however, used several times in Dussek's Sonata in F minor Op. 77 of 1812, once in his Sonata in A flat major Op. 70 (1807) and still earlier in the second movement of John Baptist Cramer's Sonata Op. 25 No. 2 (c1801), and other earlier examples can doubtless be found.
All in all, this volume is a significant addition to the under-represented Czech branch of the late eighteenth-century keyboard repertoire. I await the succeeding volumes with keen anticipation.
