Playing from memory is a strange notion for a time when most people did public performing involving a great deal of improvisation (the 17th and first half of the 18th Century) and then, so often the composer was playing his own works. I imagine that Mozart may have had a short hand score for his piano concertos…but I also imagine he had most of it in his mind. Unless the page turner was a very pretty soprano, he would probably day..NO   Don’t need it. 

Couperin spends a great deal of time telling us how to look at the harpsichord in his Art de toucher. But at the end of it he says…that this is of no use to those who must use their music…suggesting that there was a great deal of memorization going on.  There is a famous and wonderful picture of a woman playing music for a dinner party in the 1700s, the harpsichord being under the table with the keyboard extending out.  Everyone is eating and she is playing..there is no music.  

I think there is as much evidence of people playing with or without music in the past.  DIdnt Clara Schumann sit on her music?  Circumstances and repertory would probably have a lot to do with how people performed…but I also need to remind us all that memory, a muscle that is terribly powerful and more so when more used, was in full force in the past.  People memorized texts regularly.  As print got cheap, we stopped, the muscle atrophied.  And as most 20th century early music performance began as an academic rather than performance effort, we moved away from the 19th century recital model of complete memorization.  

A few rehearsals of the Mozart e flat or g minor piano quartets and they are mostly memorized…and I/m no Mozart… A Scarlatti sonata with eyes to the page is awkward and far from the free dance character of the work.  
I just can’t imagine Mozart with his two piano score doing the D minor…High production suggests active and healthy memory to me in his case rather than a need for many scores.

I could be wrong.  I may be having a memory lapse!

ANDREW




> On Feb 19, 2016, at 3:55 PM, Tilman Skowroneck <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> The reference article about Mozarts pedal piano is by Richard Maunder and David Rowland, "Mozart's Pedal Piano," Early Music 1995/2, 287--296; it contains the documents, an organological essay and music examples.
> Here's the link for Oxford UP logger-inners: http://em.oxfordjournals.org/content/XXIII/2/287.citation
> 
> The historical references (a letter by Leopold Mozart and some other documents) refer clearly to a fortepiano pedal that was put on the floor under the usual "Flügel" (which was the--surviving--1781 (or 1782, I forget) Walter 5-octave fortepiano that Wolfgang owned). The pedal was "about two feet longer and astonishingly heavy," says Leopold. On p. 287 of said article is a facsimile of the autograph of K. 466, bars 88--90, that show the stray bass notes that can't be played on a single-keyboard piano, other than with the pianist's nose.
> 
> As to whether Mozart played from the score or not: seen his enormously high production in these years, and within that production, of difficult piano concertos for his own use, it is extremely unlikely that he did _not_ play from the autograph. He probably scarcely had time to rehearse the stuff, and even less to waste time for learning them dot to dot by heart. Playing from memory wasn't an established practice then anyway. Beethoven actually rebuked the young Czerny for doing so...
> Whether Mozart used a page turner or not is a whole 'nother matter...
> 
> Tilman
> 
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