Nikolaus Harnoncourt has spent more than sixty years exploring Mozart’s last three symphonies. The present album represents the results of this engagement. It is also his first recording of these three works with his own "instrument", the Concentus Musicus Wien. This is a recording not of three independent works but of a single work in three sections: an "Instrumental Oratorium".
I am now fully convinced of this unity. Even the genesis of the work is unusual, not to say unique: a composer like Mozart writing three symphonies, one after the other, as a single vast work. (Aristotle says that "the whole" exists before the individual parts.) In this instance, what he writes is not one symphony followed by another one. It was usual to write and publish groups of works - as a rule in sets of three or six. But in this case Mozart wrote all three within a matter of weeks, without any obvious reason for doing so, whether in the form of a commission or with a concert in mind. Mozart must have had a plan: the Instrumental Oratorium did not exist as a form. That was his idea. A genius like Mozart does not stumble upon a large-scale work while writing symphonies.
These symphonies were written during one of the most productive but also one of the most difficult periods in Mozart’s life - within a matter of only a few weeks in the summer of 1788. They were entered under three separate dates in his Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke - the thematic catalogue of his works that he maintained from February 1784 until his death: the Symphony in E-flat major is dated 26 June, the Symphony in G minor 25 July and the Symphony in C major 10 August. In short, we can assume that all three works were completed in under two months, especially when we recall that it was not until 17 June that Mozart moved from the Tuchlauben in the inner city to what was then the quieter suburb of Alsergrund. Of course, he had earlier demonstrated his ability to compose very quickly when necessary - the Symphony in C major K 425 ("Linz"), for example, was written in only four days in 1783 - but it would be entirely legitimate to speak of a veritable explosion of artistic creativity during the summer of 1788.
Mozart’s biographers have often referred to the composer’s critical situation at this period, a situation reflected in the famously desperate and highly secretive begging letters that he wrote to his fellow Freemason, Michael Puchberg. But I see things very differently, as do Kenneth Hsu and Peter Gülke, for example. If Mozart needed extra money - he already had his salary as Court Composer as well as income from his pupils and from other fees -, he could always apply for credit to a publisher like Hoffmeister. He was far from being impoverished. Gambling debts - an oft-adduced argument for his begging letters - are highly unlikely, given the content of these letters, and they hardly explain his desperate need for money. Whenever he travelled to Prague or elsewhere, he used his own carriage, or else he hired one. His letters to Puchberg were evidently written for a very different reason, which Mozart did all in his power to conceal. It was presumably hush money demanded by a blackmailer. So we can forget the problem of "financial worries" as his reason for writing this Instrumental Oratorium.
As with Bach, the question is repeatedly asked: to whom was the composer addressing himself with his work? And what could the listener make of it? I believe that it would be wrong to underestimate the musical intelligence of listeners of that period. In his letters Mozart draws a clear but subtle distinction between his different types of listener. Even those he says have "long ears" - asses - are to find something in his works and feel the power of his music. It was essential in Mozart’s View that listeners should know or at least feel the significance of the various keys, and indeed this was self-evident in Mozart’s day. This sensitivity has been lost today as a result of equal temperament.
But the quality that distinguishes Mozart’s triptych is the way in which all three works are interwoven on several different levels. In this regard Nikolaus Harnoncourt bases his argument on findings reached independently by Peter Gülke and expounded in a lecture delivered in 1996 and published in 1997 under the title Im Zyklus eine Welt: Mozarts letzte Sinfonien.
Even on a formal level, the connections between these three symphonies are striking. The E-flat major Symphony begins with a proper overture or intrada, which is not found in either of the other two works, while the C major Symphony ("Jupiter") ends with a proper finale of a kind not found in either of the other two symphonies. Conversely, the G minor Symphony has no real beginning. The opening bar in the violas is a flickering ostinato in G minor that could go on for ever but which Mozart restricts to a single bar. There is an appoggiatura on every note of the first subject, preventing the listener from being able to gain a clear grasp of it and making it seem blurred instead.
The final movement of the E-flat major Symphony is unique among Mozart’s final movements. It is monothematic - there is no second subject - and it rushes through the most remote keys, ending in a cloud of dust from which there emerges this undefined, questing beginning of the G minor Symphony. The "cloud of dust" and the abruptness of the ending were violently criticized at early performances of the work, most notably by Hans Georg Nägeli in 1826. Once, when I conducted the G minor Symphony in Vienna, I prefaced it with the final bars of the E-flat major Symphony in order to clarify the transition - it was exciting for the audience, and they also found it convincing. And what happens in the final Allegro of the G minor Synnphony? At the start of the development section it is first the melody that is subverted, then the harmony: the melodic nucleus of this movement is, as it were, trampled underfoot. There follows a series of twelve descending fifths, eight of which are in the bass, taking the ground away from the harmony, with the result that we end up in keys that simply did not exist at that time. And following the total destruction of these two elements, what is to happen next? When we played this recently, I offered no explanation, but people sat there as if glued to their seats. They must have had the feeling that the ground had opened up before them and they were staring into the abyss. Salvation comes with the C major Symphony and its radiant sense of assurance. Here, too, of course, there are dangers that build up from the very beginning. In the slow movement, for example, the desire to be admitted to the sanctuary is twice rejected by a forceful "Avaunt", much as we find in Die Zaubetflöte. Only on the third occasion is the gate finally opened.
An important argument in favour of the work’s unity is the sophistication with which Mozart treats the same three themes and motifs in all three symphonies, handling them like what Peter Gülke has called "primeval building blocks". Sometimes they are clear and open, at other times invested with a labyrinthine complexity of a kind that was customary in all the arts at that time.
Even though Mozart wrote no other oratorios with the exception of La Betulia liberata (1771) and the Cantata Davidde penitente, which is a partial reworking of the Mass in C minor K 427, there is no doubt that he took an intense interest in the oratorio as a genre. A decisive role in this development was played by the diplomat Baron Gottfried Van Swieten, whose home in Vienna Mozart frequented after 1782 and who introduced the composer to works by Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, triggering a period of profound interest in their music. From 1787 onwards Mozart arranged a number of oratorios at the Baron’s behest, and he himself conducted their first performances. In the spring of 1788 - shortly before his great symphonic work - he conducted Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu. His engagement with this large-scale work may well have given Mozart ideas for his own composition.
It was first necessary, of course, for Mozart to invent the particular forms of this first Instrumental Oratorium. In striking out in this new direction, he was following a road that no one had previously taken. By dispensing with traditional forms such as choruses, arias and recitatives he was able to express his ideas and state his message through a rapid exchange of musical thoughts that clash with each other or engage in dialogue, an aim he was able to achieve in a far more direct and immediate way than in a conventional oratorio or opera.
For decades I have felt that every performance of these three symphonies amounts to a voyage of discovery. Why are their themes and motifs so closely related as to be almost identical? Why is the language of those rhetorical figures that had long been used in music explored in such exhaustive detail here? From the E-flat major intrada, then, we find ourselves setting out on a rocky road that recalls nothing so much as a psychological drama and that leads ultimately to the mighty coda at the end of the final movement of the "Jupiter" Symphony. In short, this is a goal, a final destination. There is no going on after this.
It is impossible, of course, to tell a concrete story or to impute a specific "content" to this oratorio. Like all great art, this work - as Egon Friedell has observed - is ambiguous. In this way every listener will come to his or her own conclusions about it. I do not want my own insight into the work’s unity to be regarded as merely speculative, for I am now convinced of its validity: it is a symphonic Gesamtwerk that I would describe as an "Instrumental Oratorium". Listeners may accept this insight or they remain dubious or they may even reject it: Mozart’s music is a form of language, and it speaks for itself. It does not claim to be understandable in such concrete or professorial terms.