W. A. Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor K. 397 and L. van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 31 No. 2: Semantic and Performance Aspects

Abstract

Background. The issue of performance interpretation is one of the most debatable in musicology. The article states that tonality of a musical piece is a factor that determines the performance strategy. There are many examples showing that the composer’s choice of the tonality was not accidental, rather was determined by tradition, artistic design, and the composer’s own life experience. The purpose of the article is an attempt to “decipher” the meaning of the two works in the key of D minor – one of the most meaningful and symbolic tonality – from two perspectives: musical and extra-musical contexts in order to reveal the performance strategy. Literature review. The study of the recent research and publications indicates that there is a lack of works investigating semantics of tonalities from two perspectives: 1) the influence of tonality on the composition and dramaturgy of the work; 2 those performance means by which the semantics can be “deciphered”. This statement can be substantiated by the work of L. Kazantseva (2006). Among the works on this topic is the dissertation of E. Hackmey (2012) on Mozart “Fantasy in D minor”, where the author traces the influence of this key on the composer’s work; a chapter from L. Kyrylina’s book about Beethoven (2009), which refers to the composer’s perception of this key; the article by D Schroeder (1990) discussing parallels and mutual interdependences between Beethoven, Strindberg, Berg, and others. The novelty of the study is manifested in the formulation of such questions as 1) the dependence of the composition and dramaturgy of a musical work on its tonality; 2) the ways in which tonality specifies the performance strategy. Research methods. The study uses four main methods: 1) historical, which allows considering a musical work as an agent of a certain style (in this case - classicism); 2) genre method, which represents the work in the unity of typological and individual features; 3) semantic method, which reveals the meaning of the work; 4) interpretation performance approach, which allows building a strategy for performing a musical work. The term “performance strategy” is used in the meaning, proposed by O. Pupina (2015: 9), as an “individual approach of a pianist to the use of performance means with the aim of creating intonation and sound pattern of a musical text”. We also share the view of Yu.Nikolaievska (2017a: 105) on the performance strategy as a means of communication, namely “interpretation of the Other as a subject of meaning addressing”. Conclusion. The works of W. A. Mozart and L. Van Beethoven (Fantasia in D minor, K. 397 and Piano Sonata Op. 31 No. 2) were written in the most significant, turning points in the lives of these composers (even tragic in the case of Beethoven). This led to an extremely personal tone of expression in these works. The choice of the key is by no means accidental, because in the days of Mozart and Beethoven the key of D minor had a tragic, vital and “fateful” semantics. Due to this, modern researchers can interpret tonality as a symbol. The choice of such a meaningful key determines the specific features of the composition and dramatic organization of the works under consideration. These features embody the dialectic of opposites: incompleteness and completeness, continuity and discreteness, balance and its violation, simplicity and complexity of images, stylistic unity and plurality, major and minor coloring, and so on. Identified features of composition and dramatic organization require the search for a specific performance strategy, which should be based on an understanding of the symbolic complexity of the key in D minor, with the active use of music-acoustic thesaurus (Kalashnyk, Loshkov, Yakovliev, Henkin, & Savchenko, 2021).