Mozart/Grieg - Piano Sonata No. 14, K.457 (1784/c. 1877) arr. for 2 pianos

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), baptised as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the classical era.

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Piano Sonata No. 14 in C minor, K.457 (Vienna, 1784)
Dedication: Therese von Trattner
arranged for 2 Pianos by Edvard Grieg, E.G. 113, No. 2 (1876-77)
to John Paulson (1851-1924)

I. Allegro (0:00)
II. Adagio (8:27)
III. Molto allegro (16:35)

Heide Goertz & Tina Margareta Nilssen, piano

The title page of the first publication of the C minor Sonata bears a dedication to Therese von Trattner, who was a pupil of Mozart's and the wife of Johann von Trattner, a printer and publisher who was also Mozart's landlord at the time the works were composed. As usual with Mozart's relatively few minor-mode works, the C minor sonata is a highly personal work. But here the mood is not one of storminess or tragedy, as in his G minor works, but of high drama in the operatic sense. The mood of noble suffering in the central E flat Adagio has, for example, been viewed by at least one commentator as music that appears to be a direct precursor of that Mozart was to write for the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, while the final Allegro assai is a movement in intense dramatic agitation that looks forward to the Romantics, most immediately to the "Pathétique" sonata of Beethoven.

When Grieg added an accompaniment for a second piano to Mozart’s keyboard sonatas, he did it primarily with teaching in mind. It was apparently common practice in the 1880s for teachers to accompany their pupils on a second piano (my own teacher was still perpetuating the custom 80 years on). But the resulting compositions soon found their way into the concert-hall where, according to Grieg, “the whole thing sounded surprisingly good”.
And so it does today. In trying to “impart to several of Mozart’s sonatas a tonal effect appealing to our modern ears” Grieg left a telling little document or two on just what those late nineteenth-century Norwegian ears expected.