Chapter Ten

Bach and Mozart for Violin

and Harpsichord (ca. 1944)

The sonatas of Bach and Mozart for “harpsichord with an accompaniment for
a violin,” as eighteenth-century composers entitled them, reversing the proce-
dure customary in our time, are actually, of course, works of chamber music
in which all the instrumental parts assume equal importance, unlike the con-
temporary works in which the keyboard player merely improvised an accom-
paniment on a fi gured bass. These sonatas are well known in the literature for
violin and piano, but opportunities to hear them in the form in which they
were originally conceived have been rare.
Mozart, as is known, composed his most important keyboard music at the
moment when the harpsichord was about to be replaced by another instru-
ment, the pianoforte—not the pianoforte of our day, but an instrument as
remote from it as the harpsichord, and in quality of tone and in style of play-
ing much closer to the harpsichord. It is an instrument which deserves to be
revived, for the subsequent progress of piano building has been attended with
loss as well as gain. In Mozart’s time, even long after he himself was playing
pianofortes when they were available, the harpsichord was still the keyboard
instrument most widely prevalent. The differences between the two were
still not great enough to preclude the use of either instrument interchange-
ably. Thus we fi nd thirteen out of the sixteen best-known violin sonatas of
Mozart fi rst published as “Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte with
the Accompaniment of a Violin.” Only one (K. 526) mentions the pianoforte
before the harpsichord, and the other two are without designation.
This should not be interpreted as evidence for an attempt to claim Mozart
sonatas for the harpsichord alone, for his own use of the pianoforte is well
known, but it indicates that the alternative use of the harpsichord was envis-
aged, and in our day, until the reconstruction of a good Mozart piano, the
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