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One thing that students hate to do is write their own cadenza. Once they get going they usually find it is not that hard to do. A cadenza should ideally sound as if it is improvised on several themes from the work. This is not often the case today.
Recently music critic Alex Ross took on the topic in an article in The New Yorker, “Taking Liberties: Reviving the art of classical improvisation.” In his article he writes,
The art of embellishment—improvising cadenzas, adding ornaments, taking other opportunities for creativity in performance—is a hot topic in classical music these days. For generations, conservatories preached absolute fidelity to the score: do what the composer wrote and nothing more. The problem is that the scores of prior eras can leave quite a bit to the performer’s imagination, and the earlier the piece the sparser the notation….
Musicians had been embellishing the score for centuries, and perhaps the cadenza was a way of bringing improvisation under control, corralling it. Mozart, as composer and pianist, brought the practice to its peak; one of his contemporaries stated that cadenzas should be dreamlike in their logic, expressing “ordered disorder,” and Mozart’s playing evidently had that quality. (He wrote out cadenzas for many of his concertos, so his performances may not always have been spontaneous.) Beethoven carried on the tradition—the darkly rumbling cadenza that he devised for Mozart’s D-minor Piano Concerto is a fascinating case of one composer meditating on another—but he also helped to kill it. In the first movement of the “Emperor” Concerto, the soloist is told not to make a cadenza but to play “the following”—a fully notated solo. Performers gradually stopped working out their own cadenzas, instead turning to a repertory of written-out versions. Opera singers retained more freedom, especially when it came to interpolating bravura high notes, but they, too, grew more cautious. Improvisation became the province of church organists and avant-gardists, the latter often taking inspiration from jazz.
My next recital includes the Rosetti Concerto No. 2 in E-flat, and I have been attempting to improvise a different cadenza each time I practice it and I have been experimenting with various embellishments, especially in the Rondo movement. I really think this is much closer to what Rosetti thought a real artist would do in this work. It really is time to in general loosen up a bit when it comes to cadenzas and performance practices in the Classical era. Read over the full article by Mr. Ross and give it some thought.
