Clarinetist Jörg Widmann: "The clarinet is Mozart's late love"

Mr. Widmann, at your concert on November 15th you will “play a work in the Alte Oper, then give some explanations and repeat the same piece again.

How did this idea come about?

It goes back to the artistic director Markus Fein.

Behind this is the idea, to which I feel very committed myself, that you can look beneath the surface of a score in this way.

Everyone thinks they know Mozart's clarinet quintet.

You can allude to individual passages, even stopping at dissonances that you don't necessarily associate with Mozart.

It is these dissonances and shifts to the minor key that make up the essence of the clarinet quintet.

By listening twice, the audience has the opportunity to delve deeper into the subject.

Do you also point out certain difficulties in interpretation that the listener may not even recognize?

It will happen naturally. Let us take Mozart's fallacies, these surprising turns in the minor key. In the clarinet quintet something like this occurs in the fourth chord, which could seem like a mistake. In the eighth chord, Mozart insists on this minor, which is then thematized in the entire half-hour piece. This affects interpretative questions. Because one wonders how do I play this? If I carry a sign in front of me and announce five seconds in advance, Attention, there will be a minor phrase coming soon, it won't work. To want to prove something too clear takes bitter revenge on Mozart. But the opposite of simply playing over the fallacy is not possible either. That just sounds wrong.This little example alone can illustrate the dilemma and the eternal search for a coherent interpretation of Mozart.

However, this requires a certain amount of musical education. Do you think that you can also use it to reach listeners who may not be that experienced musically?

I asked to have a piano with me. If I sit down at the piano and play this unexpected twist that I have now described verbally, everyone, with or without previous training, will understand. First I play the passage in major, as Mozart might have written it, and then I play this turn in a minor. Everyone will feel the difference. You can also use the piano to explain harmonic relationships. We always talk about rules, eight bar periods and things like that. But it gets exciting where something is canceled, one expects a certain harmony and something completely different follows. Once the audience is made aware of such exceptions, I can promise that they will listen with double pleasure. And that will be someone toowho has not dealt very much with music or classical music so far.

The music researcher Hermann Abert described the Mozart clarinet quintet as a “triumph of cantability” and as a work of unearthly beauty. How can you express beauty in words?

There are two aspects. That is definitely true about the cantability, but not exclusively. There are also concertante elements, think of the fast fourth variation, for example, where a veritable firework of virtuosity is exchanged between first violin and clarinet. It's actually like a competition, concertare in the literal sense of the word. Cantability is not in the foreground at all. Beauty, of course, is a broad field. There are wonderful definitions of beauty, from Baudelaire, for example, who, with regard to the face of a woman, asks when beauty is greatest, with perfect symmetry? Or does the irregular, the minimal deviation, weigh more? Mozart's music is also ineffably beautiful, but not in the sense of an absolutely posited, pre-existing beauty.We as interpreters have to authenticate and restore them twice every evening in every performance and now in Frankfurt. And I am convinced that we will not play twice in the same way, but the pleasure in that moment will let us emphasize other things. Here we are again with the dissonances, because there are these areas of absolutely modern factories of the unheard of, which then lead to phrases as one thinks they are familiar from Mozart. But it is only this mixture, the clash, these also dark minor areas that make his music appear so ineffably beautiful.because there are these areas of the absolutely modern facture of the unheard of, which then leads to phrases as one thinks one knows from Mozart. But it is only this mixture, the clash, these also dark minor areas that make his music appear so ineffably beautiful.because there are these areas of the absolutely modern facture of the unheard of, which then leads to phrases as one thinks one knows from Mozart. But it is only this mixture, the clash, these also dark minor areas that make his music appear so ineffably beautiful.