The flute concerto in Central Europe, 1750–1830: cadenzas, adagios, and preluding as analytical practice, with critical editions of the flute concertos by Joseph Umstatt and Georg Bayr

This thesis argues that flute concertos composed within the Viennese sphere between approximately 1750 and 1830 developed a distinctive formal rhetoric shaped by the instrument’s organological realities—its breath dependence, three-octave compass, register-specific dynamics, and developing keywork. Drawing on a corpus of seventy-eight manuscripts and early prints transcribed from European archives, the thesis refocuses the analytical lens from the first-movement allegro—the traditional locus of concerto scholarship—to three marginalised topics: the pause-sign (fermata, cadenza, Eingang), the slow movement, and the inter-movement prelude, where the genre’s aesthetic identity is most fully articulated.

Three contextually and analytically focussed chapters address these topics. Chapter 1 traces the evolution of cadenza practices from undifferentiated quaver streams in mid-century manuscripts to fully composed obbligato episodes by the 1820s, demonstrating that the flute’s physical constraints generated cadenza traditions diverging from keyboard and violin models. Chapter 2 examines slow-movement design through four defining features—bassetto accompaniment, inverted pedal points, solo-initiated movements, and the Romance form—arguing that these constitute a coherent compositional idiom in which the flute’s limitations function as catalysts of formal innovation. Chapter 3 introduces the Dernier coup d’archet Prelude Hypothesis, a three-condition framework for identifying historical preluding opportunities at concerto movement seams, documented through twelve instances across the corpus and supported by eleven sample preludes composed by the author.

Two critical editions accompany the three chapters: the first modern scholarly editions of Joseph Umstatt’s three flute concertos (GroF 827, 829, and 830), prepared from autograph and copyist sources at the Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe, and an edition of Georg Bayr’s two published flute concertos (opp. 3 and 6), collated into score-form from part-books housed at archives across Bratislava, Brno, Prague, and Vienna. The thesis contributes practical resources for historically informed performance, repositioning the flute concerto from the periphery of concerto scholarship to its centre.