Download Program notes by - Symphony Orchestra Augusta

Magnificent Mozart – February 22, 2014
Overture to
Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), K. 486
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
In January 1786, while hard at work on Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart received an order from
Emperor Joseph II to provide a one-act Singspiel (opera with spoken dialogue instead of
recitative) for an imperial entertainment scheduled the following month. The Emperor
himself chose the librettist and even outlined the plot.
The action involves a series of auditions held by the impresario of a touring company.
Aspiring actors recite from popular plays of the day while two sopranos get into a fight over
precedence and a tenor tries to mediate. In the end, under the impresario’s threat that he’ll
cancel the whole production, they all finally come together in a show of unity and the
production proceeds.
The premiere in Schönbrunn Palace and the subsequent performances for the public were a
smashing success.
Mozart provided this lightweight piece with a grand overture that is a parody of the playlet
that follows. Its fast pace and generous scoring were strongly influenced by the composer’s
concurrent work on Figaro.
Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
Mozart composed a total of 28 solo keyboard concertos, most of them for his own use in
subscription concerts in Vienna. Consequently, the timing of their composition was
influenced by the artistic climate and the economic wellbeing of the city. For five years after
Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, he was a hot commodity both as a composer and a virtuoso
performer. Commissions were flooding in, and his economic position was quite comfortable
– that is to say, he couldn’t squander the money quite as fast as it was coming in. Thus, in the
short period between 1782 and 1786, with a booming economy creating a heyday for musical
life in Vienna, Mozart composed 17 of these concertos, including this one in C minor. During
those years aristocratic families vied with one another to underwrite and sponsor concerts of
the latest in musical fashion. “Concertos,” he wrote to his father, “are a happy medium
between what is too hard and too easy...pleasing to the ear...without being vapid.”
Occasionally, however, Mozart felt the urge to break away from this popular mold. In March
1786, in the middle of composing his most effervescent and popular comedy, The Marriage
of Figaro, he sat down to compose the stormy and somber C minor Piano Concerto, one of
only two concertos he wrote in minor keys.
It is always important when considering music of the Classical period to pay special attention
to works in minor keys, because their rarity makes them the conveyors of particular
emotional pathos. For Mozart, as well as for many composers of seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, each key, and especially each mode, was believed to have specific rhetorical and
emotional significance. There were entire treatises written on the emotional affects of specific
elements in music, and, although few composers “composed by the book,” Audiences knew
the general tenets of the system and reacted accordingly. It is analogous to how we
automatically attribute emotional affect to background music for film or television.
Mozart premiered the C-minor Concerto at his own concert in April. It left the audience
uncomfortable, as storms and tragedy were not popular in Vienna’s aristocratic circles.
However at the height of the Romantic era in the following century this concerto and its D
minor (K. 466) companion, supposedly representing Mozart’s tragic and “demonic” side,
were his most frequently performed concertos.
There are a number of interesting points to make about this work. The orchestra, the largest
for any of his concertos, includes both oboes and clarinets, both of which play prominent solo
roles. The clarinet was a relatively new addition to the late eighteenth-century orchestra, and
Mozart explores its novel sound qualities.
The opening theme of the first movement – which, incidentally, is not echoed by the piano –
lends itself to being broken up into short motives. It is these fragments of the theme that
Mozart explores throughout the rest of the movement. The leaps of a major seventh carries
the weight of emotive burden and renders the theme virtually impossible to sing (Such
angular melodies belonged to the category of extreme emotion, anger and even hysteria in the
treatises.)
The second movement, in contrast, presents a simple lyrical tune, used as a refrain for the
rondo, an unusual structure for a slow movement. No matter how poignant the episodes
between the refrain, Mozart continually inserts this optimistic musical reminder.
The final movement is a set of C minor variations, a structure seldom used by other
composers of this period in concertos but one that Mozart especially liked and developed.
The coda that brings the concerto to a close speeds up the tempo, ending the work on a note
of tension, a conclusion that was bound to disturb an audience who were accustomed to
rousing, happy endings.
Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K.525
(Serenade in G Major)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
During the last four years of Mozart’s life, he was continually short of money. In spite of
years of effort, he was unable to obtain a court appointment to the kind of prestigious musical
position he considered appropriate for his talents. He was forced, therefore, to become one of
the first of music history’s great freelancers. His operas, so revered after his death, saw
indifferent success, and there was a steady decline in commissions, in part the result of a
general economic downturn in Vienna, in part reflecting changing musical tastes.
The musical form known as the serenade underwent many transformations between the end
of the sixteenth century and Mozart's time. The term was first applied to nocturnal “musical
greetings” and certain Italian madrigals, but by the mid-eighteenth century it had evolved into
a multi-movement instrumental composition. The term was used interchangeably with
“divertimento” and sometimes even as the title of a single movement. Usually performed
outdoors as background music, serenades were often scored for winds – in Mozart’s Vienna,
particularly the wind octet (or Harmoniemusik). The structure of the movements, however,
was similar to that of other multi-movement chamber and orchestral pieces (the string quartet
and the symphony), although generally lighter in mood and complexity. That being said, in
one instance, Mozart transcribed note-for-note his Serenade in c minor for wind octet, K. 388
as the String Quintet, K. 406. This serenade and the Serenade in B-flat, K. 361 “Gran Partita”
for thirteen wind instruments, are major works of great musical depth.
With his serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart brought the form back indoors, since it
was scored for two violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass – or multiples thereof – and
would be hard put to compete with outdoor noise. According to the autograph, Mozart
composed it in Vienna in August 1787, at the same time he was working on his opera Don
Giovanni. In the personal catalogue of his compositions, Mozart listed it as Eine Kleine
Nacht-Musick (although the surviving manuscript has no title). Originally it was a fivemovement work, but the second movement, a minuet and trio, was either removed by the
composer or was lost sometime before 1800. The occasion or commission for which he
composed it is unknown, but one theory states that it was for one of his closest friends at the
time, Gottfried von Jacquin, for whom he had already composed a number of other works.
The four-movement version was first printed in 1826/27 with the title "Serenade."
Eine kleine Nachtmusik represents a marked contrast in mood and musical complexity in
comparison to Mozart's other works written around this period such as the G minor Quintet,
K 516 or Don Giovanni. It harks back to the simpler style of the divertimenti and serenades
of his Salzburg period.
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
When listening to any popular and well-known piece of music, it is difficult to keep from
being lulled into inattention by its sheer familiarity. And while we can never hear a 200-yearold work from the point of view of its original audience, it is useful to pretend, at least, to be
hearing it for the first time.
Despite the fact that most modern listeners tend to regard the key of a work as irrelevant,
musicians of the Baroque and Classical periods regarded certain keys as possessing specific
emotive qualities, or “affects.” Minor keys in particular were fraught with emotional
significance, and few symphonies in this period were written in minor keys. For Mozart, the
key of G minor was the key of extreme pathos. He used it sparingly for some of his most
heart-wrenching music: the String Quintet K.516; the Piano Quartet K 478; Pamina’s aria
“Ah, ich fühl’s” from The Magic Flute; and, of course, the stormy so-called “Little G minor”
Symphony (No. 25) K. 183 written when he was only 17.
Mozart’s final three symphonies, nos. 39, 40 and 41, were written over a two-month period in
1788, probably as part of a portfolio of new works destined for a series of summer concerts in
Vienna. Unfortunately, we lack any information on whether the concerts actually took place,
much less about their reception. At this point his career was already in decline despite the
success of his two great operas Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro written in
collaboration with his brilliant librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. That is not to say that Mozart’s
music was somehow denigrated or considered no longer pleasing; his published scores were
selling briskly and his music was being performed all over Europe. It was almost as if there
was a surfeit of Mozart – that he was too well known. And although he was in desperate need
of funds to support his lifestyle, his legendary productivity faltered as well.
The three symphonies reflect very different moods, the darkest being that of No. 40. It is
almost as if the tragedy of this symphony saw its resolution only in the triumph of No. 41
(nicknamed “The Jupiter,” but not by Mozart). Ironically, we know less about the
circumstances surrounding this most famous of Mozart’s over 600 creations, nor can we
extrapolate any specific, solid evidence of how it might have reflected the circumstances of
his life or his emotions.
The opening theme of Symphony No. 40, with its hushed, nervous introductory upbeat in the
violas, sets the tone of urgency and anxiety that pervades the entire work. The second
movement Andante is the only movement in a major key. But while it begins serenely
enough, it, too, turns dark and intense in the course of its development.
Even the Minuet, usually the most lightweight movement in a Classical symphony, retains
the original key and is characterized by a series of phrases ending on successively higher and
higher notes, ratcheting up the emotional tension. Restatements of the theme in imitative
counterpoint pile on top of each other in their agitation. The Trio, at least, provides an
emotional break, however slight.
The theme of the finale is a musical portrayal of hysteria, a shrill arpeggio ending in a sighing
appoggiatura, followed by a pounding motive in the orchestra that closes with an echo of the
sigh in the lower register. Despite a lyrical second theme, the movement is in constant
nervous motion. Finally, Mozart subverts the custom of ending symphonies in minor keys in
the major, and stays in G minor to the end. Even Tchaikovsky concluded his morose Fifth
Symphony in triumph.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
[email protected]
www.wordprosmusic.com