DISSERTATION

The Cadenza Question

Yale School of Music, Doctor of Musical Arts Dissertation, April 2016

“At the heart of the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto in D minor, k. 466, the empty cadenza grants everyone except Mozart a responsibility for how his piece will go. What does the performer do in Mozart’s absence? It is an extremely vulnerable moment lending the performer a composer's responsibility. The composer-performer is free from the burden of "composing" as one understands the composer's task to "invent." Instead, he or she recycles and manipulates preexisting material within certain conventional structures- the treatment of which reveals elements the composers find compelling. An investigation of the structural significance of cadenza and its symbiosis with the sonata form, building upon idiosyncrasies of the concerto form, can be expressive of the composer-performer’s own voice within the constraints of Mozart’s work.”

— Dr. Samuel S. Suggs