Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K332

Although he attended the Leipzig Conservatory at the age of ten and five years later studied with Liszt’s pupil Eugen d’Albert for a short time, Wilhelm Backhaus (1884-1969) otherwise received no formal training. He was no stranger to England, having made his London début at the age of sixteen and, when only twenty-one, in the same year that he won the Anton Rubinstein prize in Paris, he took up a post at the Royal Northern College of Music. While there Backhaus deputised for an indisposed Alexander Siloti at a Manchester Hallé Orchestra concert under the great Austro-Hungarian conductor Hans Richter (1843-1916). It was Richter who had conducted the Vienna première of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and he offered interpretive advice to Backhaus.

In April 1960 Backhaus was at the BBC for a broadcast of three Beethoven Sonatas – Les Adieux, Op.81a, Moonlight, Op.27 No.2 and the last great Piano Sonata in C minor, Op.111. The latter two from this particular broadcast are heard here and most interesting in the C minor Sonata is the tempo Backhaus chooses for the Arietta. Marked Adagio molto semplice e cantabile and often played extremely slowly, Backhaus begins more at an Andante. In doing so he retains a constant tempo throughout and does not speed up for the later variations as some pianists do. The duration of just over thirteen minutes for this movement, including all the repeats, is almost identical to both his mono and stereo studio recordings whereas Wilhelm Kempff, in his mid 1960s recording, takes fifteen and a half minutes.

Backhaus only recorded a handful of Sonatas and Concertos by Mozart. He played K.330, K.331 and K.332, works favoured by many pianists, but he also played two of the earlier Piano Sonatas – K.282 and K.283. For the BBC recital in November 1961 Backhaus chose to play K.330 in C major and K.332 in F major. With a career beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the end of the 1960s, the young Backhaus would have been influenced by the performance practices of the mid-nineteenth century in Mozart playing through the ‘Dresden china’ school of playing Mozart of the 1950s. In the outer movements Backhaus tends to slow down for the second subjects to give a different and contrasting character and in the slow movements he plays with a depth of tone and feeling that may be frowned upon by some urtext performers who think they know the ‘correct’ way to play Mozart. Backhaus knew that the music speaks for itself and his line of thought and sense of structure are always clear and never sentimental. The studio recital ended with Beethoven’s Les Adieux Sonata.

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