All Mozart Classical Night
Tuesday - August 10. 8:00 pm

Mozart - Symphony no. 39, K. 543, Eb major
Mozart - Symphony no. 40, K. 550, G minor
Mozart - Symphony no. 41, K. 551, C major (Jupiter)

This concert is sponsored by the Ralph and Genevieve B. Horween Foundation

Program 4

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)

Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major, K. 543
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550
Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, “Jupiter”

Composed in 1788.

The city of Prague fell in love with Mozart in January 1787. His Figaro met with a resounding success when he conducted it there on January 17th, and so great was the acclaim that was awarded his Symphony in D major (K. 504) when it was heard only two days later that it has since borne the name of the Bohemian capital. He returned to Vienna in early February with a signed contract to provide Prague with a new opera for its next season. The work was Don Giovanni, and Mozart returned to Prague on October 1st to oversee its production. Again, he triumphed. He was invited to take up residence in Prague, and he must have been tempted to abandon Vienna, where his career seemed stymied and the bill-collectors harassed him incessantly, but, after six weeks away, he returned to the imperial city for at least two pressing reasons. Personally, his wife, Constanze, was due to deliver their fourth child in December, and she wished to be close to her family for the birth. (A girl, Theresa, was born on December 27th.) Professionally, the venerable Christoph Willibald Gluck was reported near death, and Mozart, who had been lobbying to obtain a position at the Habsburg court such as Gluck held, wanted to be at hand when, as seemed imminent, the job became available.

Mozart arrived back in Vienna on November 15th, one day after Gluck died. Three weeks later, he was named Court Chamber Music Composer by Emperor Joseph II, though the ambitious composer was disappointed with both the salary and the duties. He was to receive only 800 florins a year, less than half the 2,000 florins that Gluck had earned, and rather than requiring him to compose operas, a form in which he had proven his eminence and to which he longed to fully devote himself, the contract specified he would write only dances for the imperial balls. Still, the income from the court position, the generous amount he had been paid for Don Giovanni and his fees for various free-lance jobs should have been enough to adequately support his family. However, his desire to put up a good front in public with elegant clothes, expensive entertaining and even loans to needy (or conniving) musicians, largely to prove to the world that he could handle his affairs after the death of his father the preceding year, drained his resources.

Mozart pinned his hopes for the amelioration of his financial debacle on the introduction of Don Giovanni to Vienna. This production took place on May 7, 1788, but the piece was received coolly. “The opera is divine, finer perhaps than Figaro,” allowed the Emperor, “but it is not the meat for my Viennese.” Within a month began the pathetic series of dunning letters to his well-to-do fellow Mason Michael Puchberg requesting loans. To his credit, Puchberg responded faithfully, though he was certainly a shrewd enough businessman to realize that repayment was unlikely. Only two weeks after the first letter, Mozart was back asking for more money to settle his overdue rent. “My landlord was so pressing that I was obliged to pay him on the spot (in order to avoid any unpleasantness), which caused me great embarrassment,” he confided to his benefactor. On June 17th, his bill settled, he moved out of his apartment in Vienna to cheaper lodgings in the suburb of Währing. “I have worked more during the ten days that I have lived here than in the two months in my former apartment,” he explained to Puchberg on June 27th. “If dismal thoughts did not so often intrude (which I strive forcibly to dismiss), I should be very well off here, for I live agreeably, comfortably and, above all, cheaply.”

Despite the disappointments inflicted upon him by the fickle tastes of the Viennese, his precarious pecuniary position, and an alarming decline in his health and that of his wife, Mozart was still working miracles in his music. On June 26th, just a week after he had settled in Währing, he finished the E-flat Symphony (K. 543), the first of the incomparable trilogy that he produced within two months during that unsettling summer of 1788. It is unknown how long he had been working on, or even considering, these pieces, since not a single sketch for them is known to exist. The reason that he wrote the E-flat, G minor and C major (“Jupiter”) Symphonies has never come to light. If they were composed on some flight of pure inspiration, with no upcoming performance or publication in prospect, they would be unique in that respect in his entire output. At a time when he was desperate for money, it seems unlikely that he would have spent precious hours on one, much less three, jeux d’esprit. The only mention he made of them was in the catalog of his works, where he noted the completion date of each one (June 26th, July 25th, August 10th). They are referred to nowhere in his correspondence, which had declined sharply in volume after the death of his father a year earlier. One explanation is that they might have been written for a series of concerts he planned originally for June and July, but which was several times postponed for lack of subscribers and eventually cancelled completely. (For the rest of his life, he was unable to muster enough support among the Viennese to present a concert of his own in that city.) A second possibility is that the three symphonies were written on speculation to be published as a set. Haydn had enjoyed excellent success with such a venture in Paris only two years before, and Mozart may have been encouraged to try his luck in a similar venture. A third consideration might have been the trip Mozart was trying to arrange at that time to London, a town where a composer could make more money than on the Continent. Should the tour materialize, he reasoned, these symphonies would make a fine introduction to the British public. None of these three situations came about, however, and the genesis of Mozart’s last three symphonies will probably always remain a mystery.

In refutation of the long-held theory that Mozart never heard his Symphonies Nos. 39, 40 and 41, it now seems likely that he used them for several occasions. In 1789 he undertook a German tour hoping to secure patronage or, perhaps, a permanent post. The program listings for the concerts in Dresden on April 14th and in Leipzig on May 12th mention a “grand new symphony” by Mozart, but do not give specifics. Somewhat more than a year later, on October 15, 1790, he was in Frankfurt to give a concert as part of the festivities surrounding the coronation of Leopold II. He hoped (vainly) to reap some benefit from the assembled nobles by presenting “a grand symphony” and a piano concerto (No. 26 in D, K. 537, “Coronation”). On April 16 and 17, 1791, the Vienna Tonkünstler Society, a charitable organization of professional musicians, played “a new great symphony by Herr Mozart.” For each of these occasions, Mozart would have offered his most impressive, most recent works in the form, and would almost certainly have chosen one or more of the 1788 symphonies.

“A veritable triumph of euphony” (Otto Jahn); “the most limpid and lyrical music in existence” (Eric Blom); “the most purely joyous utterance in musical literature” (Donald N. Ferguson) — thus have these learned commentators characterized Mozart’s sumptuous E-flat Symphony. The work opens with a large introduction bearing a surprising emotional weight. The remainder of the movement, however, uses its sonata form as the basis of a lovely extended song rather than as an intense drama. The halcyon mood carries into the second movement, a sonatina in form (i.e., sonata without a development section) and a sunbeam in spirit. The Minuet, with its sweet Trio led by the woodwinds, is a vivacious dance of grace, elegance and, at the swift Allegretto tempo indicated, a certain prescient Romantic vigor. The finale combines Haydn’s wit and verve with Mozart’s suavity of style and harmonic felicity.

The G minor alone of the last three symphonies may reflect the composer’s distressed emotional state at the time of its composition. It is among those great works of Mozart that look forward to the passionately charged music of the 19th century while epitomizing the structural elegance of the waning Classical era. “It may be,” wrote Eric Blom in his study of the composer, “that the G minor Symphony is the work in which Classicism and Romanticism meet and where once and for all we see a perfect equilibrium between them, neither outweighing the other by the tiniest fraction. It is in this respect, at least, the perfect musical work.”

The Symphony’s pervading mood of tragic restlessness is established immediately at the outset by a simple, arpeggiated figure in the violas above which the violins play the agitated main theme. This melody is repeated with added woodwind chords to lead through a stormy transition to the second theme. After a moment of silence (a technique Mozart frequently used to emphasize important structural junctures), a contrasting, lyrical melody (in B-flat major) is shared by strings and winds. The respite from the movement’s prevailing powerful energy provided by the dulcet second theme is brief, however, and the level of tension soon mounts again. The wondrous development section gives prominence to the fragmented main theme. The recapitulation returns the earlier themes in heightened settings.

The Andante, in sonata form (as are all the movements of Mozart’s last six symphonies, save the minuets), uses rich chromatic harmonies and melodic half-steps to create a mood of brooding intensity and portentous asceticism. Much of the movement, especially the development, makes use of the repeated notes of the opening theme and the quick, fluttering figures of the second subject.

Because of its somber minor-key harmonies, powerful irregular phrasing and dense texture, the Minuet of the Symphony No. 40 was judged by Arturo Toscanini to be one of the most darkly tragic pieces ever written. The character of the Minuet is emphasized by its contrast with the central Trio, the only untroubled portion of the entire work.

The finale opens with a rocket theme that revives the insistent rhythmic energy of the first movement. The gentler second theme, with a full share of piquant chromatic inflections, slows the hurtling motion only briefly. The development section exhibits a contrapuntal ingenuity that few late 18th-century composers could match in technique, and none surpass in musicianship. A short but eloquent silence marks the beginning of the recapitulation, which maintains the Symphony’s tragic mood to the closing page of the work.

The evaluation that the French musicologist F.J. Fétis wrote of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 remains as valid today as when it appeared in 1828: “Although Mozart has not used formidable orchestral forces in his G minor Symphony, none of the sweeping and massive effects one meets in a symphony of Beethoven, the invention which flames in this work, the accents of passion and energy that pervade and the melancholy color that dominates it result in one of the most beautiful manifestations of the human spirit.”

The sobriquet of the Symphony No. 41 — “Jupiter” — did not originate with Mozart. The composer’s son Franz Xavier Wolfgang said that it was the invention of the impresario Salomon, famous as the instigator of Haydn’s London residencies. Weightier evidence for author of the subtitle, however, points to John Baptist Cramer, a German musician who moved to London and opened a publishing house. He may have been the first to deify this work when he appended the word “Jupiter” to its title for a concert of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on March 26, 1821. The cognomen has no meaning other than to indicate the Symphony’s grand nobility of style, and the esteemed English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey dismissed it as “among the silliest injuries ever inflicted on a great work of art.” Philip Hale even warned that the sobriquet might lead away from the true nature of the music, “[which] is not of an Olympian mood. It is intensely human in its loveliness and its gaiety.” Mozart would probably have agreed.

The “Jupiter” Symphony stands at the pinnacle of 18th-century orchestral art. It is grand in scope, impeccable in form and rich in substance. Mozart, always fecund as a melodist, was absolutely profligate with themes in this Symphony. Three separate motives are successively introduced in the first dozen measures: a brilliant rushing gesture, a sweetly lyrical thought from the strings, and a marching motive played by the winds. After a unison held note, yet another idea is presented, this one comprising an octave leap followed by a quick scale passage in the woodwinds. These motives are woven together to form a climax leading to the formal second theme, a simple melody first sung by the violins over a rocking accompaniment. This, too, accumulates several component motives as it progresses. The closing section of the exposition (begun immediately after a falling figure in the violins and a silence) introduces a jolly little tune that Mozart had originally written a few weeks earlier as a buffa aria for bass voice to be interpolated into Le Gelosie Fortunate, an opera by Pasquale Anfossi. Much of the development is devoted to an amazing exploration of the musical possibilities of this simple ditty. The second portion of the development is dominated by the rushing figure that opened the movement. The thematic material is heard again in the recapitulation, but, as so often with Mozart, in a richer orchestral and harmonic setting.

The second movement is one of the most intensely expressive essays in Classical-era music. “There is spiritual seriousness; there is perfect form, exquisite proportion, and euphony,” wrote Philip Hale. This ravishing Andante is spread across a fully realized sonata form, with a compact but emotionally charged development section.

The third movement (Minuet) is a perfect blend of the light-hearted rhythms of popular Viennese dances and Mozart’s deeply expressive chromatic harmony.

The finale of this Symphony has been the focus of many a musicological assault. It is demonstrable that there are as many as five different themes played simultaneously at certain places in the movement, making this one of the most masterful displays of technical accomplishment in the entire orchestral repertory. But the listener need not be subjected to any numbing pedantry to realize that this music is really something special. Eric Blom, good sensible Englishman that he was, wrote of this movement, “There is a mystery in this music not to be solved by analysis or criticism, and perhaps only just to be apprehended by the imagination. We can understand the utter simplicity; we can also, with effort, comprehend the immense technical skill with which its elaborate fabric is woven; what remains forever a riddle is how any human being could manage to combine these two opposites into such a perfectly balanced work of art.” Mozart was the greatest genius in the history of music, and he never surpassed this movement.

Of this remarkable work, Charles O’Connell wrote, “Mozart put aside the exigencies of time and circumstance, and, we imagine, wrote a symphony after his own heart. There has been nothing, and there are no indications that there will be anything, in music to surpass it in its special virtues. In it, the inner Mozart spoke. He wrote not for the age, but for the ages.”