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Pamela L. Poulin
A T 10:30 ON F RIDAY EVENING , 7 O CTOBER 1791. Mozart wrote to his wife Constanze at Baden:
Now for an account of my own doings. Immediately after your departure I played two games of billiards with Herr von Mozart, the fellow who wrote the opera which is running at Schikaneder's theater [ Die Zauberflöte at the Theater auf der Wieden]; then I sold my nag for fourteen ducats; then I told Joseph the First [his manservant] to fetch me some black coffee, whh which I smoked a splendid pipe of tobacco; and, then, I orchestrated almost the whole of Stadler's rondo. 1
The rondo to which Mozart referred was most certainly the third movement of the Concerto, K. 622, written for his friend, Anton Stadler, clarinet virtuoso and principal clarinet of the Imperial Court Orchestra. The work was scored for Stadler's unusual Bass-Klarinet , as it was called in its earliest known mention on a program Stadler had presented at the Imperial court Theater in Vienna on 20 February 1788. The program announced that Herr Stadler would play a concerto and a variation on the ''Bass-Klarinet, an instrument of new invention and manufacture of the Royal Instrument Maker Theodor Loz [ sic ]; this instrument bas two low tones more than the normal clarinet [probably d and c].'' 2 In 1790 the Berlin Musikalischer Korrespondenz reported that Anton Stadler ''improved his instrument with some lower notes, so that e is no longer the lowest tone but rather c, a third below this. He also negotiates the c[sharp ] and d[sharp ] in between, and those with amazing ease!'' 3 With the death of
1 The Letters of Mozart and His Family , trans. Emily Anderson: 2d ed. A. Hyatt King and Monica Carolan (New York: St. Martin's Press. 1966), 2: 967. I have slightly altered the translation. For a facsimile of a silhouette of Stadler and the concert program for 20 February 1788, see the present author's article ''The Basset Clarinet of Anton Stadler,'' College Music Symposium 22, no. 2 (1982): 67-82.
2 ''Bass-Klarinet; einem Instrumente von einer neuen Erfindung, und Verfertigung des k. k. Hof-Instrumentenmachers, Theodor Loz: dieses Instrument hat zwey tiefe Töne mehr, als die gewöhnliche...