Alan Dudley wrote:

>Is the character of a piece changed if it is transposed? Is this merely a
>tradition carried over from the days when the keys were actually different
>because of the tuning of the instruments used?

Perhaps it is completely fanciful of me, but I have always felt that with
Mozart in particular the key of the piece is indeed a key (sorry) to the
kind of music it is going to be.  And hopeless as I am at remembering those
K numbers from *the* Mozart-Verzeichnis, if you are talking about string
quartets or piano concertos you only have to mention the D minor or the G
major and I'm with you instantly.  While there were obviously technical
reasons for writing the clarinet concerto and quintet in A and the horn
concertos in E flat, the keys of symphonies, piano and violin concertos and
so on were under no similar constraints.  But take, for example, the great
C minor mass and the great C minor piano concerto.  Okay, they are both in
the minor mode, but it seems to me that the music of these works has other
similarities which are not shared by works in other minor keys.  It is as
though one can talk intelligibly about Mozart's C minor music, his D major
music, and so on.

This may be related to the pitch at which he would have played or heard
them, and of course the sound that we hear today might be more or less
'authentic', but leaving all that aside there is - it seems to me -
something else, something in the very character of the music, which is
deeply related to its key, such as - for example - to make the C minor and
the D minor piano concertos such very different works from each other and
- to take another example - the D major piano sonatas and the D major
string quartets so essentially cognate.

Alan Moss