Luogo e data di registrazione		Kingsway Hall, London (United Kingdom): - novembre 1979 (K. 74g) - settembre 1980 (K. 444) - marzo 1982 (K. 550) St. Jude's Hampstead Garden Suburb, London (United Kingdom): - maggio 1980 (K. 43, 45, 76, 45b, 51, "Neue Lambacher", 48)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Morten Winding & Peter Wadland / Simon Eadon & John Dunkerley
	Prima Edizione LP		Oiseau Lyre - D173D3 (3 LP's) - durata 58' 27" | 57' 01" | 50' 44" - (p) 1982 - Analogico/Digitale (K. 550)
	Prima Edizione CD		Oiseau Lyre - 421 135-2 (3 CD's) - durata 60' 14" | 70' 18" | 64' 06" - (c) 1987 - ADD/DDD (K. 550)
	Edizione Integrale CD		Decca (Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre) - 480 2577 (19 CD's) - (p & c) 2009 - ADD / DDD
	Note		L'Edizione in 3 CD's (421 135-2) è diversamente miscelata rispetto all'originale pubblicazione in LP: contiene infatti anche le Sinfonie K. 16a e K. 45a).

Mozart and the symphonic traditions of his time by Neal Zaslaw Vienna's Orchestras Perhaps the most important turning point in Mozart's life came at the age of twenty-five, when he already had to his credit a corpus of music that many a lesser talent would gladly have accepted as the fruits of a lifetime. He decided to break with his father and the Archbishop of Salzburg, and to remain in Vienna as a free-lance teacher, performer and composer - a decision which had far-reaching implications for his music and, hence, for the evolution of the Viennese classical style as a whole. We have already offered ample documentation, in the programme notes for volumes 2-5 of this series, of Mozart’s disaffection towards Salzburg. TheArchbishop was stingy and insufficiently appreciative. Leopold Mozart was continually looking over his son's shoulder and passing judgement. Musical life was circumscribed and tastes conservative in Salzburg, and Mozart’s opportunities to show what he could do in his favourite genres - piano concerto and opera - were extremely limited. He joyously described Vienna to his father as 'keyboard land' (which it was); he might with equal justification have called it 'orchestra land'. Charles Burney was only one of many visitors to Vienna who commented upon the excellence of the orchestral playing there. During his 1772 visit he attended performances at the two principal theatres and gave this expert testimony: 'The orchestra [at the German theatre] has a numerous band, and the pieces which were played for the overture and act tunes, were very well performed, and had an admirable effect; they were composed by Haydn, Hofman[n], and Vanhall. The orchestra here [at the French theatre] was fully as striking as that of the other theatre, and the pieces played were admirable. They seemed so full of invention, that it seemed to be music of some other world, insomuch, that hardly a passage in this was to be traced; and yet all was natural, and equally free from the stiffness of labour, and the pedantry of hard study. Whose music it was I could not learn; but both the composition and performance, gave me exquisite pleasure.' Even if testimony such as Burney’ s had not come down to us, we would have been able to guess the calibre of the Viennese players by the ever-increasing difficulty of Mozart’s orchestral writing in his piano concertos and operas. These difficulties were the object of complaint in other parts of Europe, and in Italy well into the 19th century his operas were considered impossible to perform. Vienna did not have a single large orchestra of international reputation, comparable to, for example, the Mannheim Orchestra, the opera orchestras of Milan and Turin, or the orchestra of the Concert des amateurs in Paris. Unlike in Paris and London, there was no flourishing music-publishing industry in Vienna. The Imperial Court Orchestra was in a period of severe decline. But Vienna was the economic, political and cultural centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which encompassed not just Austria and Hungary, but substantial portions of present-day Czechoslovakia, northern Italy, Yugoslavia and Rumania. Many wealthy noble families from those regions maintained homes in Vienna. A surprising number of them were musically literate and demanded a steady flow of music of the highest quality. It was thus no coincidence that, along with dozens of lesser composers, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven - none of whom were natives of Vienna - preferred that city to all others. Mozart’s decision to stay in Vienna in 1781 was based not only on its reputation but on firsthand experience. He had spent almost three months in Vienna in 1762 when he was six, more than a year there in 1767-68 when he was twelve, and two months in 1773 when he was seventeen. There are no symphonies from the first visit, for even the precocious Wolfgang did not write symphonies at the age of six. By 1767, however, he had several symphonies to his name, and during the 1767-68 visit to Vienna contributed a few more to the genre. He may have written a symphony during his brief stay in 1773, but in any case he was inspired by what he heard to write several after his return to Salzburg (see the notes to volume 4 of this series). And, of course, it was after settling permanently in the Imperial capital that he wrote his most famous essays in the genre: the Haffner, the Prague, the Linz, the Symphony in Eb, K. 543, the 'Great' G minor Symphony, and the Jupiter. Thus, however much the formation of Mozart’s symphonic style owed to the Italian sinfonia, to the 'English' symphonies of J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel, to the brilliant orchestral writing of the Mannheim composers, and to local Salzburg traditions, there was also an early and continuing Viennese influence, culminating in the final flowering of symphonic masterpieces. The theatre orchestras of Vienna needed a constant supply of symphonies to serve as overtures to plays, Singspiele, and operas. High Mass in Saint Stephen's Cathedral, and perhaps in some of the other large churches of the City, was sometimes embellished with symphonies. During Lent, Advent and on holy festivals of the liturgical calendar, stage works were replaced by oratorios and concerts (called 'academies') requiring further symphonies. (There were no concert halls as such; the academies took place in the theatres and in large rooms found in palaces, in taverns and in other commercial buildings.) The nobility and the court had their private concerts which, when they were orchestral, also needed symphonies. Finally, another of Vienna's charms was a surprising amount of outdoor music-making - events of a sort that leave no historical traces in the form of newspaper announcements, posters or programmes. A description from the early 1790s serves to suggest that this too was an arena in which Mozart’s symphonies may have been heard: 'During the summer months... one will meet serenaders in the streets almost daily and at all hours... They do not, however, consist as in Italy or Spain of a vocal part with the simple accompaniment of a guitar or mandolin... but of trios, quartets (most frequently from operas) of several vocal parts, of wind instruments, frequently of an entire orchestra; and the most ambitious symphonies are performed... It is just these nocturnal musicales which demonstrate... the universality and the greatness of the love of music; for no matter how late at night they take place... one soon discovers people at their open windows and within a few minutes the musicians are surrounded by a crowd of listeners who rarely depart until the serenade has come to an end.' The variety of occasions on which symphonies were performed goes a long way to explaining why so many hundreds of Viennese symphonies survive from the 18th century. Having suggested the influence of Vienna’s orchestral traditions and of its vigorous symphonic school on Mozart’s symphonies, the matter must at once be qualified. The Haffner symphony was written for Salzburg, the Linz and Prague for the cities whose names they bear, and the final trilogy possibly for an aborted trip to England. All were, in the event, presumably pressed into use for Viennese concerts; but it seems that, although Mozart felt the need constantly to write new piano concertos for his own use, when in need of symphonies he remained content most of the time to perform his own older works, or sometimes those by other composers. Thus, for instance, we find him writing to his father in January 1784, asking to be sent four of his symphonies from 1773-77 for his concerts in Vienna. As there was no single orchestra dominating Viennese musical life and with which Mozart’s symphonic activities there can be connected, we have for these performances recreated a typical Viennese ensemble, avoiding both the extremely small groups that not infrequently performed at private concerts and the huge groups occasionally gathered together for special events. In the latter category a concert of 1781 is usually mentioned, at which a symphony of Mozart’s was performed by an orchestra whose strings were 20-20-10-8-10, and the wind all doubled except for the bassoons, which were tripled! (This exceptionally large orchestra was a traditional part of the annual Lenten benefit concert given by the 'Society of Musicians' to aid the widows and orphans of musicians. It was a feature of this special event that every available performer should join in supporting the cause.) Mozart reported to his father that 'the symphony went magnificently and had every success'. A great deal of rubbish has been written about the possible implications of this event, suggesting that if Mozart was so very pleased, then this must have been the sort of orchestra he would have preferred but usually could not muster. However, one must reckon with the extreme defensiveness of Mozart’s letters to his father, in which he can be observed constantly striving to be entertaining and to make his affairs sound more brilliant than they in fact were. Then we must remember that, even if the symphony 'went magnificently and had every success', we do not therefore have Mozart’s opinion about what sort of an orchestra he would have preferred to lead on a regular basis. He must have been keenly aware that in enlarging an orchestra one traded clarity, flexibility and intimacy for power and brilliance, and in the long run he may or may not have wanted such an exchange. Finally, the orchestras upon which Mozart’s training and taste were formed and for which he most often composed, in Vienna and elsewhere, were usually of middling size, rather than the tiny private groups or the occasional mammoth extravaganzas. (The exception was the small but distinguished Prague orchestra, with whom Mozart developed a special relationship.) He was a practical musician who wrote for the customary performing conditions of his day, and we should not foist upon him exceptional circumstances which can be seen with hindsight to prefigure later trends. Thus, for our recordings of the 'Viennese' symphonies, we have employed strings numbering 7-6-4-3-3, a pair each of the necessary woodwind and brass, and kettledrums. Performance Practice The use of 18th-century instruments with the proper techniques of playing them gives to the Academy of Ancient Music a vibrant, articulate sound. Inner voices are clearly audible without obscuring the principal melodies. Subtle differences in articulation are heard more distinctly than is usually the case with modern instruments. The observance of all of Mozart’s repeats restores many previously truncated movements to their just proportions, yet, perhaps owing to the lively tempos and luminous timbre, does not make them seem too long. A special instance concerns the da capos of the minuets, where, oral tradition tells us, the repeats should be omitted. But, as we were unable to trace that tradition as far back as Mozart’s time, we experimented by observing those repeats as well. Missing instruments understood in 18th-century practice to be required have been supplied: these include bassoons playing the bass line along with the cellos and double basses, kettledrums whenever trumpets are present, and the harpischord or fortepiano continuo. No conductor is needed, as the direction of the orchestra is divided in true 18th-century fashion between the concertmaster and the continuo player, who are placed so that they can see each other and are visible to the rest of the orchestra. The absence of a conductor does not mean that there is no interpretation, but rather that quite a different type of interpretation, arrived at by different means, becomes possible. As there was wide variation in orchestral practice from region to region in western Europe, no all-purpose classical orchestra could be recreated; rather, we have attempted to present the several kinds of ensembles for which Mozart Wrote, and whose peculiarities he had in mind While he composed. Musical Sources and Editions Until recently performers of Mozart’s symphonies have relied solely upon editions drawn from the old Complete Works, published in the 19th century by the Leipzig firm of Breitkopf & Härtel. During the past three decades, however, a new complete edition of Mozart’s works (NMA) has been appearing, published by Bärenreiter of Kassel in collaboration with the Mozarteum of Salzburg. The NMA has been used for those works for which it was available (in this volume, only for K. 550). For K. 425a the Diletto musicale edition by Charles H. Sherman was used; for K. 45b, Einstein's C.F. Peters edition. For the other symphonies, editions have been created especially for these recordings. A Note Concerning the Numbering of Mozart's Symphonies The first edition of Ludwig Ritter von Köchel's Chronological-Thematic Catalogue of the Complete Works of Wolfgang Amaadé Mozart was published in 1862 (=K1). It listed all of the completed works of Mozart known to Köchel in what he believed to be their chronological order, from number 1 (infant harpsichord work) to 626 (the Requiem). The second edition by Paul Graf von Waldersee in 1905 involved primarily minor corrections and clarifications. A thoroughgoing revision came first with Alfred Einstein's third edition, published in 1936 (=K3). (A reprint of this edition with a sizeable supplement of further corrections and additions was published in 1946 and is sometimes referred to as K3a.) Einstein changed the position of many works in Köchel's chronology, threw out as spurious some works Köchel had taken to be authentic, and inserted as authentic some works Köchel believed spurious or did not know about. He also inserted into the chronological scheme incomplete works, sketches, and works known to have existed but now lost. These Köchel had placed in an appendix (=Anhang, abbreviated Anh.) without chronological order. Köchel's original numbers could not be changed, for they formed the basis of cataloguing for thousands of publishers, libraries, and reference works. Therefore, the new numbers were inserted in chronological order between the old ones by adding lower-case letters. The so-called fourth and fifth editions were nothing more than unchanged reprints of the 1936 edition, without the 1946 supplement. The sixth edition, which appeared in 1964 and was edited by Franz Giegling, Alexander Weinmann, and Gerd Sievers (=K6), continued Einstein's innovations by adding numbers with lower-case letters appended, and a few with upper-case letters in instances in which a work had to be inserted into the chronology between two of Einstein's lowercase insertions. (A so-called seventh edition is an unchanged reprint of the sixth). Hence, many of Mozart's works bear two K numbers, and a few have three. Although it was not Köchel's intention in devising his catalogue, Mozart's age at the time of composition of a work may be calculated with some degree of accuracy from the K number. (This works, however, only for numbers over 100). This is done by dividing the number by 25 and adding 10. Then, if one keeps in mind that Mozart was born in 1756, the year of composition is also readily approximated. The old Complete Works of Mozart published 41 symphonies in 3 volumes between 1879 and 1882, numbered 1 to 41 according to the chronology of K1. Additional symphonies appeared in supplementary volumes and are sometimes numbered  42 to 50, even though they are early works. © 1982 Neal Zaslaw Bibiography Anderson, Emily: The Letters of Mozart & His Family (London, 1966) Burney, Charles: The Present State of Music in Germany, The Netherlands, and United Provinces (London, 1773) Della Croce, Luigi: Le 75 sinfonie de Mozart (Turin, 1977) Eibl, Joseph Heinze, et al.: Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Kassel, 1962-75) Koch, Heinrich: Musilcalisches Lexikon (Frankfort, 1802) Landon, H. C. Robbins: 'La crise romantique dans la musique autrichienne vers 1770: quelques précurseurs inconnus de la Symphonie en sol mineur (KV 183) de Mozart', Les influences étrangères dans l'oeuvre de W. A. Mozart (Paris, 1958) Larsen, Jens Peter: 'A Challenge to Musicology: the Viennese Classical School', Current Musicology (1969), ix Mahling, Christoph-Hellmut: 'Mozart und die Orchesterpraxis seiner Zeit', Mozart-Jahrbuch (1967) Mila, Massimo: Le Sinfonie de Mozart (Turin, 1967) Saint-Foix, Georges de: Les Symphonies de Mozart (Paris, 1932) Schneider, Otto, and Anton Algatzy: Mozart-Handbuch (Vienna, 1962) Schubart, Ludwig: Christ, Fried. Dan. Schubart's Ideen zu einer Asthetik der Tonkunst (Vienna, 1806) Schultz, Detlef: Mozarts Jugendsinfonien (Leipzig, 1900) Sulzer, Johann Georg: Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Berlin, 1771-74) Zaslaw, Neal: 'The Compleat Orchestral Musician', Early Music (1979), vii/1 Zaslaw, Neal: 'Toward the Revival of the Classical Orchestra', Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association (1976-77), ciii		Symphony in F major, K.42a (76) Although the attribution of this attractive symphony to Mozart is fraught with problems, the work's authenticity has apparently never previously been seriously challenged. There is no autograph manuscript or other reliable source stemming from Mozart or his circle. The symphony’s sole source was a set of 18th-century manuscript parts found in the archives of the Leipzig music publishers, Breitkopf & Härtel. In accepting this work, Köchel followed his friend Otto Jahn, who in his great Mozart biography reported that in the Breitkopf archives he had found a collection of twenty symphonies attributed to Mozart. Ten of these were also listed in Johann André's collection of Mozartiana, which, as it had been received directly from Mozart’s widow, was not to be questioned. (The assumption of the total reliability of the André holdings has subsequently proved to be not entirely correct.) A further two of the twenty were symphony versions of the overtures to Lucio Silla and II sogno di Scipione. The remaining eight, owing to the company in which they were fund, could therefore be adjudged genuine. Jahn dated the sympony ’177?’ while Köchel ventured 'perhaps 1769' - both presumably on stylistic grounds. On the weighty authority of Jahn and Köchel, the symphony was published in a supplementary fascicle of the Old Complete Works in 1881, the only edition the work has ever had. In their detailed survey of Mozart’s output, Wyzewa and Saint-Foix placed K.42a in Salzburg between 1 December 1766 and 1 March 1767. They suggested - on the basis of perceived similarities between the first movement of this work and the overture to Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots, K.35, and on the basis of comparisons with Mozart’s earliest symphonies - that K.42a, ’...was composed before the overture, perhaps around the month of December 1766. It is the great piece that the child wrote, with extreme effort and care, when, returning to Salzburg [from his grand tour to Paris, London and Holland], he wished to show his master and his compatriots everything he had learned during his travels.' To call this 'speculation' is perhaps too generous; it is sheer fantasy. The great Mozart biographer Hermann Abert examined the arguments of Wyzewa and Saint-Foix and, while questioning the similarities they had proposed between K.42a and the overture to K.35, agreed with them that the work must be earlier than Köchel had thought. Finally, in the third edition of the Kochel Catalogue (K3), Einstein gave as the supposed date of this orphaned work, 'autumn 1767 in Vienna'. The basis for this judgment was not explained, but a seemingly unrelated remark may reveal his line of reasoning. The minuet of this symphony, Einstein wrote, 'is of a relatively so much greater maturity than the other three, primitive movements, that we may accept that it was composed later. As Einstein claimed that Viennese symphonies were nearly always in four movements (which is not nearly as firm a principle as he would have us believe) and that Mozart was in the habit of adding minuets and trios to three-movement symphonies written for other places to tailor them for Vienna, he must have thought that the (hypothetical) addition of a minuet and trio to K.42a associated it with one of Mozart’s visits to the Imperial capital. In any case, this rootless symphony has retained the assignment 'allegedly in autumn 1767 in Vienna' in K6 (the sixth edition of Köchel's Catalogue), and we have kept it there for lack of better information. At present, further documentary study of K.42a is impossible, for there are no known primary sources of the work, and the sole secondary source (the parts in the Breitkopf archives) was lost or destroyed during World War II. Unlike some other symphonies uncertainly attributed to Mozart, this one at least does not have a conflicting attribution to another composer. If, however, we are indeed to judge it by the company it kept in the Breitkopf archives, then we must report that seven of the twenty symphonies mentioned by Jahn remain to this day without autographs or other reliable sources. A striking feature of the first movement is the prominence of the wind, which, in addition to the usual pairs of oboes and horns, include a pair of obbligato bassoons. Wyzewa and Saint-Foix singled out for mention 'the oboe and bassoon solos, the constant exchanges of melodic ideas between the wind and strings. In regarding this as a progressive trait, they must have had in mind the brilliant and innovative concertante wind writing in Mozart's late operas, symphonies and piano concertos. Perhaps they considered K.42a a step in that direction. But they failed to notice how very uncharacteristic this wind writing was for Mozart, for this or any other time. In his early symphonies, the expositions of the first movements typically begin and end tutti, forte, often with semiquaver tremolos in the strings adding to the bustle. In the middle of the exposition, however, quieter, lyrical sections usually appear, corresponding with the arrival of the dominant, at which some or all of the wind fall silent. This use of orchestration serves several important functions: it highlights the movements' dynamics by the wind reinforcement of the tuttis, it underlines the contrast of character that is a hallmark of the galant style, it clearly signals to the ear the movement’s structure, and it gives the wind players a breathing space. This arrangement was an absolutely standard part of Mozart’s style of that period. In the first movement K.42a, however, the wind never stop blowing, thereby giving the movement an uncharacteristically uniform timbre throughout. Have we the right to deny Mozart an experiment? Of course not. We revel in his experiments. But was this one of them? The alluring andante, with its sustained bassoons and mandoline-like pizzicato passages, would have been very much at home as a serenade in a sentimental opéra comique of the period, as Della Croce suggests. The particular excellence of the minuet has already been mentioned. The trio, rather unusually, is based on an idea drawn from the minuet - an idea with a slightly exotic contour. The opening idea of the finale bears a striking resemblance to a popular gavotte from Rameau's Temple de la gloire (Act III, scene iii), as Wyzewa and Saint-Foix were the first to point out; but for the rest the two movements are entirely dissimilar. Symphony in F major, K.43 With this work we escape from the bibliographical swamps of the previous symphony and find ourselves again on terra firma. The autograph manuscript-abeautifully-written fair-copy found among the manuscripts formerly in Berlin but now in Kraków - bears the heading Sinfonia di Wolfgango Mozart à Vienne 1767. Above '1767' was written (apparently in Leopold Mozart’s hand) 'à olmutz 1767,' but this was subsequently crossed out. The Mozarts visited the North Moravian town of Olmutz, or Olomouc, on only one, unhappy occasion, between approximately 26 October and 23 December 1767. They had fled there from Vienna in the vain hope of avoiding an outbreak of smallpox, to which however both Wolfgang and Narmerl eventually succumbed, and from which both recovered. From the inscriptions on the autograph, Einstein in K3 concluded that K.43 must have been begun either in Vienna in the autumn and completed in Olomouc, or begun in Olomouc and completed in Vienna at the end of December, and the editors of K6 concur. But K.43 cannot have been completed in Vienna at the end of December 1767 for, although the Mozarts did indeed leave Olomouc around 23 December, they reached Vienna only on 10 January of the new year. The reason for the slowness of their journey was this: in the course of their flight from Vienna they had stopped at Bmo (Brünn), where the Count von Schrattenbach (the Archbishop of Salzburg’s brother) had arranged that they give a concert. Leopold wanted his children even further from Vienna’s smallpox epidemic, however, so he postponed the concert until their return trip. Hence the Mozarts returned to Brno on Christmas Eve, and on 30 December they gave their concert, which was duly noted in the diary of a local clergyman: 'In the evening... I attended a musical concert in a house in the city known as the 'Taverna', at which a Salzburg boy of eleven years and his sister of fifteen years, accompanied on various instruments by inhabitants of Brünn, excited everyone’s admiration; but he could not endure the trumpets, because they were incapable of playing completely in time with one another.' The report of Wolfgang's reaction has the ring of truth to it, for his extreme sensitivity to trumpets in his childhood is documented elsewhere. Trumpets aside, however, if Leopold Mozart was anything other than pleased with the local orchestra, he was polite enough to hide the fact, for the leader of the Brno waits reported that: 'Mr Mozart, Kapellmeister of Salzburg, was completely satisfied with the orchestra here and would not have believed that my colleagues could accompany so well at the first rehearsal.' We propose the following hypothetical scenario for K.43: it was composed in Vienna between 15 September and 23 October 1767, copied over in Olomouc after Wolfgang's recovery from smallpox, and may have received its première on 30 December in Brno. But what could the trumpets have been playing? As they come down to us, none of the symphonies composed by Wolfgang prior to the end of 1767 calls for trumpets. Among his other orchestral works, only a pastiche keyboard concerto, K.40, an offertory, K.34, and a recitative and aria, K.33i (36), call for trumpets. An offertory would not have been perfonned at a concert in a tavern, and in any case there is indirect evidence suggesting that the Mozarts had brought none of these three works with them on tour. The most likely explanation, therefore, is that at least one of Mozart’s earliest symphonies did once have trumpet parts, which, as was sometimes the case with Mozart and his contemporaries, were optional and notated separately from the score. This suggestion is made the more plausible by a document written by Nannerl (and reproduced in the introduction to K.16 in volume l of this series) in which she recalled that Wolfgang's 'first' symphony employed trumpets. K.43 would not have been one of the symphonies with optional trumpets, however, for Mozart’s usual trumpet keys were C, D, and Eb major. As the provenance of the previous work is so uncertain, we may provisionally regard K.43 as Mozart’s first four-movement symphony, all of the earlier ones having been in three movements. The first movement opens with a fanfare identical to that used by J.C. Bach, Johann Stamitz, and Dittersdorf to launch symphony movements. Then follows a so-called Mannheim crescendo, the turn to the dominant, the opening fanfare in the bass with tremolo above, a lilting theme (strings alone, piano) and the energetic closing section of the exposition. A concise development section, based on the fanfare in the bass and some new material, leads to the lilting theme, now in the tonic, and the recapitulation of the rest of the exposition. The andante presents a strikin change of orchestra colour, created by a new key (C major), flutes replacing oboes, first violins muted, second violins and bass instruments pizzicato, and violas, divisi, murmuring in semiquavers. The movement is an arrangement of the eighth number of Mozart’s Latin comedy Apollo et Hyacinthus (concerning which see the discussion of K.38 in volume 2 of this series). The Greek legend of Apollo and Hyacinth relates that both Zephyr andp Apollo loved a youth, Hyacinth, who, however, cared only for Apollo. When out of jealousy Zephyr killed Hyacinth, Apollo turned his blood into the flower that to this day bears his name. The duet, which serves as the second movement of the present symphony, occurs near the end of the opera after the story’s action is finished. Two subsidiary characters muse in a rather abstract, allegorical vein about divine anger and loss of grace. The eleven-year-old prodigy, perhaps finding little specific in the words to inspire him, seems to have set the situation rather than the text, composing a movement of almost sublime serenity. A particularly luminous minuet and quirky trio prepare us for the energetic 6/8 finale. The symphony appears to have been written con amore throughout, and is one of the best works produced by the eleven-year-old Wolfgang. Symphonies in D major, K.45 and K.46a (51) The existence of two versions of the same symphony offers us a precious opportunity to learn something further about the conditions under which the youthful composer worked. The autograph of K.45, now in West Berlin, bears the inscription Sinfonia di Sig[no]re Wolfgang Mozart/1768, 16 Jener - thus it was completed just a few days after the return to Vienna from the journey to Olomouc and Brno chronicled in the notes to the previous work. There is no record of the Mozarts giving a public concert at this time, so we must assume that this symphony was written for one of Vienna's many private concerts. The Mozarts had a two-and-a-half-hour-long audience with Maria Theresa and her son, the recently crowned Emperor Joseph II, only three days after the completion of K.45. Music was discussed during the audience and Wolfgang and Nannerl performed, but as none of the court musicians were present no orchestral music can have been played. It was apparently on this occasion that Joseph suggested that Wolfgang write an opera for Vienna - an opera that will feature in this tale of two symphonies. The earliest occasion on which, as far as we know, K.45 could have been heard was near the end of March at a grand Lenten concert which, Leopold reported to his friends in Salzburg, 'was given for us at the house of His Highness Prince von Galitzin, the Russian Ambassador’ . The precise date and contents of this programme are not known, but the Mozarts’ usual custom was to begin and end with symphonies, filling the middle of the event with arias, concertos, chamber music, two- and four-hand keyboard music played by Wolfgang and Nannerl, and keyboard irnprovisations by Wolfgang. K.45 is, like K.43, in the four-movement format favoured in Vienna for concert purposes. By the time of the Russian ambassador's concert, Leopold Mozart had already overstayed the leave of absence granted him from his duties at the Salzburg Court, and the Archbishop had issued an order stopping his pay until he returned. The reason that he had not returned to Salzburg was that - following the Emperor's suggestion - Wolfgang had indeed composed a comic opera, La finta semplice, K.46a (51), but its production was repeatedly delayed as a result of jealous intrigues on the part of several Viennese musicians. Rumours were being circulated that Wolfgang was a fraud, and that his father did his composing for him. Leopold, a man with an acute sense of honour, felt that he could not leave Vienna before he and his son were vindicated. Yet although he battled valiantly against his opponents, even to the point of appealing directly to the Emperor, the opera remained unperformed in Vienna. (The Mozarts were able to retreat with their honour intact only because Wolfgang was permitted to compose, and direct the performance of, the music for the consecration of a new church, a gala occasion at which the entire court was present.) The overture for the illfated la finta semplice was a re-working of Wolfgang’s last symphony, K.45. The changes he wrought in turning a concertor chamber-symphony into an overture-symphony are revealing. He omitted the minuet and trio. He altered the orchestration, adding pairs of flutes and obbligato bassoons to the original pairs of oboes and horns, while dropping the trumpets and kettledrums. The additions were perhaps to be expected, for, as we can easily imagine, the opera house in Vienna had at its disposal larger orchestral resources than had most private concerts; but the dropping of the trumpets is surprising, since operas of the period so often call for them to lend verisimilitude to ceremonial and military scenes. Perhaps a comic opera could dispense with these accoutrements of the nobility. Wolfgang also added a considerable number of phrasing and dynamic indications to the re-worked symphony. Whether these represent a spelling-out of ideas implicit in K.45 (and conveyed in rehearsal to the orchestra by Wolfgang leading from the harpsichord) or whether they represent a re-thinking of the piece, cannot be ascertained. But in the preparation of the versions recorded here, care was taken that the members of the Academy of Ancient Music rehearsed and recorded K.45 before looking at K.46a, so that ideas that Wolfgang may not yet have thought of at the time he conceived the former could not be added to the latter through unhistorical hindsight. He also altered the metre of the andante from C to CI, and the melody’ s quavers to dotted quavers and semiquavers. Finally, Wolfgang added two additional bars of music to the first movement and four to the finale. It would be nice to think that in the addition of these bars we catch a glimpse of him refining the symphony' s proportions, but the truth may be something more mundane. In the case of the first movement, a bar that was present in the exposition had been lacking in the recapitulation while an entirely different bar that was present in the recapitulation had been lacking in the exposition. Wolfgang merely brought the exposition and recapitulation into conformity and the differences between them may simply have been the results of a lapse of memory, rather than a new artistic discovery. In the finale, the changes were to the ending. The last two bars of K.45 were replaced first with two bars that led directly into the opera’s opening chorus and then, when Wolfgang wanted to use the overture of K.46a as an autonomous work, with a concert ending that incorporated the two original bars, the two new bars, and two additional ones. The finale is based on a time that was to enjoy considerable popularity in London around 1800 under the name 'Del Caro’s Hornpipe’. A similar time also appears in the Intrada of Leopold Mozart’s Musical Sleigh-ride. The origins of this tune-type are undoubtedly lost in the mists of oral tradition. Symphony in G major, K.deest The Benedictine monastery at Lambach, near Wels in Upper Austria, was a convenient resting place for the Mozart family on their journeys between Salzburg and Vienna. Like many other Bavarian and Austrian monasteries of the time, Lambach provided rooms and meals for travellers, and maintained an orchestra to ornament its liturgy and to provide entertainment. Amand Schickmayr, a friend of Leopold Mozart from the days when both men were students at Salzburg University, had been at Lambach since 1738 and had become abbot of the monastery in 1746. At the beginning of January 1769 the Mozart family, returning to Salzburg from their second trip to Vienna, stopped at Lambach. We do not know how long they remained there on this occasion, as the visit is not mentioned in the family’s letters or diaries, and in fact is known to us solely from inscriptions on two musical manuscripts. The manuscripts in question are sets of parts for two symphonies in G major, one inscribed Sinfonia/a 2 Violini/2 Oboe/2 Corni/Viola/e/Basso./ Del Sig[no]re Wolfgango/Mozart./Dona Authoris/4ta Jan. 769, and the other bearing an identical inscription except that in place of 'Wolfgango' there appears 'Leopoldo'. For convenience of reference, the symphony ascribed to Wolfgang at Lambach will be referred to here as 'K.45a', and that ascribed to Leopold as 'G16'. Until 1982 the two symphonies were thought to survive only in the Lambach manuscripts, neither of which is an autograph. Both were reserved in the monastery's archives where they were discovered by Wilhelm Fischer, who, in 1923, published K.45a. Prior to that, however, K.45a had appeared in K1 and K2 as A221, one of ten symphonies known to Köchel solely by the incipits of their first movements, found in a Breitkopf & Härtel Manuscript Catalogue. In K3 Einstein placed the rediscovered Symphony in G major, A221, in the chronology of authentic works according to the date on the Lambach manuscript. Speculating that the symphony had been written during the 1767-8 sojourn in Vienna, he assigned it the number 45a, representing the beginning of 1768. The editors of K6 accepted Einstein's and Fischer's opinion of the authenticity of K.45a/A221, as did Georges de Saint-Foix and many others who wrote about Wolfgang's early symphonies, and Einstein's dating of the work to early 1768 was generally accepted too. In 1964, however, Anna Amalie Abert published a startling new hypothesis about the two G-major symphonies. She had come to believe that - like the accidental interchange of infants that underlines the plots of a number of plays and operas and is given such a delightful sendup in O’Keefe's comedy Wild Oats - the two works had been mixed up, perhaps by a monkish librarian at Lambach. Abert based her opinion on a close examination of the two symphonies, and on comparisons between them and other symphonies thought to have been written by Leopold and Wolfgang at about the same time. Abert's stylistic analysis suggested that K.45a was written in a more archaic style than G16, and her aesthetic evaluations suggested that the former was less well written than the latter. She then reasoned that, as Leopold was the older, the more conservative, and the less talented of the two composers, he must have been the author of K.45a and Wolfgang of G16. Comparing formal and stylistic characteristics of the first movements of the two symphonies with those of the first movements of other symphonies of that period by Leopold and Wolfgang, Abert found that the first movement of K.45a seemed to resemble Leopold's first movements while the first movement of G16 seemed to resemble Wolfgang's. She also pointed out the (relative) monothematicism of the first movement of K.45a, which is considered an archaic trait, and therefore likely to have come from the older composer. Certain aspects of K.45a's construction - the adding together of many two-bar phrases and the over-use of sequences - Abert considered to be characteristic of Leopold's works; while the more spun-forth and varied melodic ideas of G16 struck her as akin to Wolfgang’s technique. Her doubts about K.45a had to do, 'above all with the remarkable plainness and monotony of the second and third movements, which immediately catch the eye of the close observer of the symphonies K.16 to 48'. Accordingly, she edited the previously unpublished G16 as a work of Wolfgang’s, and it has since been frequently performed, recorded and discussed as such. Abert’s hypothesis is not quite as highhanded as it might at first appear to anyone unaware that a large number of 18th-century symphonies survive with incorrect attributions. For example, leaving aside the Lambach symphonies, some seven symphonies exist with attributions to both Wolfgang and Leopold. In 1977-8, when this series of recordings was being planned, I studied Abert’s arguments, found them convincing, and decided that we should record G16 rather than K.45a. However, in the autumn of 1981, in the course of research for these notes and for a book-in-progress about Mozart’ s symphonies, I re-examined Abert’s evidence as well as some evidence overlooked by her, and was forced to conclude that the original attributions were correct. A brief summary of the evidence follows. (1) Abert found that the stringing of two-bar phrases in K.45a was atypical of Wolfgang, yet according to Ludwig Finscher, ' ...the technique of many minor composers of the 1760s and 1770s - including Mozart - was to place two-bar, fourbar, and eight-bar sections in a row, sometimes adding a bar, or changing the order of sections'. Besides, as the more spun-forth style (Fortspinnungstypus) of G16 was a late-Baroque trait and the more segmented style (Liedtypus) of K.45a a galant trait, this distinction, far from supporting Abert’s new attributions, contradicts them. (2) The manuscripts of both Lambach symphonies prove to be in the hand of the Salzburg copyist and friend of the Mozarts', Joseph Richard Estlinger. (This fact was known to Abert, but not to Einstein.) This means that the symphonies must have been copied in Salzburg before the Mozarts' departure for Vienna in September 1767. The earlier that we think K.45a was composed, the less surprise we should experience at finding the apprentice-composer writing in an 'archaic' style. In particular, Abert’ s comparisons of K.45a and G16 with K.43 and 48 are much weakened by an earlier dating of K.45a, for if the latter was composed in 1766 or the first part of 1767, then its 'immaturity’ of style in comparison with works from the end of 1767 and the end of 1768 is not surprising. This was after all a period during which Wolfgang's musical knowledge and craft were growing by leaps and bounds. (3) Mozart himself immodestly claimed to be able to write in any style, and his boast is in some measure borne out by the manner in which he assimilated musical styles and ideas during his tours. (4) Although Leopold was a generation older than his son and may not have had his son's originality, he was nonetheless an able, well-informed musician. Let us not forget that he too made the tours and heard the latest musical styles of western Europe. In the 1760s, he was a thoroughly up-to-date composer, while Wolfgang had yet to find his distinctive 'voice'. It is thus not difficult to believe that during that period father and son may have written symphonies in which the fathers style was in some aspects more modern than the son's. And is it not reasonable to suspect that some of Leopold's mature works may have been better constructed than some of his son's childhood works, in the genesis of which he so often took part as teacher, advisor, editor, and copyist? (5) In accepting Vienna as the place of K.45a's creation, commentators were made uncomfortable by the fact that it was in the three-movement format of the earliest symphonies written in London and Holland rather than the four-movement format which, as we have seen, was favoured in Vienna and used by Wolfgang in the symphonies (K.43, 45 and 48) that can confidently be assigned to the 1767-68 sojourn there. (6) Then we must ask ourselves, how plausible is it that the manuscripts of the two symphonies were interchanged? After all, the titles and the inscriptions 'Del Sig[no]re Wolfgango [or 'Leopoldo'] Mozart' on the manuscripts of K.45a and G16 respectively were written by the Salzburg scribe. Only the final words on each manuscript, 'Dono Authoris 4ta Jan. 769' are in a different hand, undoubtedly that of one of the Lambach monks. Are we to believe that these two manuscripts were accepted from a copyist well known to the Mozarts, carried around by them for more than a year, used for performances, and presented to the Lambach monastery, without the usually punctilious Leopold having corrected these supposedly incorrect attributions? (7) Finally, in 1767 Leopold Mozart assembled six of Wolfgang’s early symphonies to have copied and sent to the Prince of Donaueschingen. New evidence now suggests that these six were probably K. 16, 19, 19a, 19b, 38 and 45a. If so, then K.45a is certainly by Wolfgang and must have been completed prior to the Mozarts' departure for Vienna on 11 September 1767. Having reached these conclusions in the autumn of 1981, I worked out my arguments in an article for a voltune honouring my former professor, Paul Henry Lang (see bibliography). Then in April 1982 the February issue of the Mitteilungen der Internationalen Stiftung Mozarteum came into my hands, and in it was an article by Robert Münster, head of the Music Division of the Munich Staatsbibliothek, containing new evidence confirming the correctness of my arguments in favour of Wolfgang’s authorship of, and an earlier date for, K.45a. The Munich library recently acquired the previously unknown, original set of parts for K.45a. They comprise first and second violin parts in an unknown hand, a basso part in Nannerl's hand, and the rest of the parts in Leopold's hand. The title page, also in Leopold's hand, reads Sinfonia/à 2 Violini/2 Hautbois/2 Corni/Viola/e/Basso/di Wolfgango/Mozart di Salisburgo/à la Haye 1766. K.45a therefore forms a pendant to the Symphony in Bb major, K.22, also composed in the Hague, and to be heard in volume 1 of this series. The Symphony in G major, G16, is presented here, according to our original plan. It is hoped that the other Lambach symphony, K.45a, will be issued on a single record at some future date. Symphony in Bb major, K.45b (A214) This is another of the ten symphonies known to Köchel solely by a first-movement incipit, taken from the Breitkopf & Härtel Manuscript Catalogue. Prior to the publication of K3 Einstein had located a set of 18th-century parts for this work in the Berlin library bearing the title Synfonie Ex Bb, a 2 Violini, 2 Oboe, 2 Corni, Viola è Basso/Del Sig. Cavaliere Amadeo Wolfgango Mozart Maestro di concerto di S.A. à Salisburgo. Wolfgang received the unpaid post of 'maestro di concerto' to the Salzburg Court on 14 November 1769, and earned the right to call himself 'Cavaliere' on 5 July 1770, when he was decorated in Rome with the Order of the Golden Spur. But Einstein felt (presumably on stylistic grounds) that this symphony could not have been written later than the beginning of 1768, and thus he arrived at the Köchel number 45b. In Einstein’s opinion, therefore, the Berlin manuscript constituted a later copy of an earlier work, and this may indeed be correct. As an indirect consequence of World War II, K.45b was published twice, once in Leipzig, edited by Müller von Asow, and once in New York, edited by Einstein. The discussion of the previous symphony having clearly revealed the pitfalls of dating and attribution on stylistic grounds, perhaps nothing further need be said on that point other than that the time and place of creation of K.45b, and perhaps even its author, remain in question. The first movement is written in a type of sonata form in which the ideas presented in the exposition recur in reverse order in the second part, a mirror-image technique of which Mozart was later to make brilliant use (for example, K.133, first movement). Much has been made of the presence in the bass line of K.45b of the famous motive do-re-fa-mi of the Jupiter symphony’s finale, but little has been said of the fact that it appears too often, sometimes awkwardly transposed to different scale degrees. In the andante, another sonata-form movement but in Eb major, the horns are silent; the violins, occasionally joined by the oboes, play their duets far above the bass line. An eminently danceable minuet is contrasted by a trio in F major for strings only. The final allegro in 2/4 is also in sonata form; it brings the symphony to a cheerful if conventional conclusion. Symphony in D major, K.48 Why, virtually on the eve of his departure from Vienna after a stay of more than a year, did Wolfgang write another symphony? Was there a farewell concert or a private commission? (We know of none.) Was something needed immediately upon the retum to Salzburg? (But surely the other symphonies written in Vienna could have served?) The autograph manuscript of this work, now found in West Berlin, is inscribed Sinfonia/di W: Mozart/1768/à Vienna/den 13ten dec:. On the very next day Leopold Mozart wrote to a friend in Salzburg his final letter from Vienna, but no forthcoming event that might explain the need for a new symphony is mentioned. In that letter Leopold remarked: 'As very much as I wished and hoped to be in Salzburg on His Highness the Archbishop's consecration day [21 December], nonetheless it was impossible, for we could not bring our affairs to a conclusion earlier even though I endeavoured strenuously to do so. However, we will still set out from here before the Christmas holiday...' As we have seen, the Mozarts were long overdue at Salzburg, and Leopold's pay was being withheld. We might expect, under these circumstances, that they would have left Vienna almost immediately after Wolfgang' s triumph on 7 December, when he led his own mass (K.47a/139), offertory (K.47b) and trumpet concerto (K.47c) in the presence of the Imperial Court and a large crowd of onlookers. Yet something held the Mozarts in Vienna for more than a fortnight after that. That 'something' may have been the unknown occasion for which K.48 was written, perhaps a farewell concert in the palace of one of the nobility. Like K.45, K.48 is in the festive key of D major and calls for trumpets and kettledrums in addition to the usual strings and pairs of oboes and horns. Like both K.43 and 45, K.48 is in four movements. Its opening allegro, in 3/4 rather than the more customary common time, begins with a striking idea featruing dotted minims, alternately forte and piano. In the space of a mere six bars this melody covers a range of two-and-a-half octaves. It is soon followed by nervous quavers in the bass line and running semiquavers in the violins, which, with an occasional comment from the oboes and one dramatic silence, lead the energetic exposition to its conclusion. The movement, like all four in this symphony, has both halves repeated. The development section, exceptionally for this period in Mozart's life, is nearly as long as the exposition; in the course of its modulations it reviews the ideas already heard. The recapitulation gives them again in full, and the movement thus provides a lucid demonstration of James Webster’s seemingly paradoxical description of sonata form as "a twopart tonal structure, articulated in three main sections" (The New Grove). The andante, in G major 2/4 for strings alone, is a charming little song in binary form. The peculiar character of the opening idea is owing to its harmonization in parallel 6-3 chords and the rather sing-song quality of its melody, which almost reminds one of the tune to a nursery rhyme. This leads, however, to a second, more Italianate, idea, which, with its larger range and insistent appogiaturas, conveys a much more operatic impression. The minuet reinstates the wind, although the trumpets and drums drop out for the contrasting G-major trio. Here Mozart perfectly captured the stately pomp that Viennese symphonic minuets of the time provided as a kind of aesthetic stepping-stone between the Apollonian slow movement and the Dionysiac finale, which in this case is a 12/8 jig in a large, binary design. Symphony in Bb major, K.AC11.03 (74g, A216) The story behind this symphony is just as peculiar as that of the Lambach symphonies. Like K.45a and 45b, this work was known to Köchel only by its incipit in the Breitkopf Manuscript Catalogue. Sometime shortly after the turn of the 20th century, however, a set of parts was discovered in the Berlin library, and the work was published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1910. According to a detailed list in K6 showing the contents of the Old Complete Works, this edition formed the final fascicle of the supplementary voltunes, as 'Serie 24, No. 63'. And indeed, like other Mozart scores published by Breitkopf as offprints from the Complete Works, the copy of K.74g available to me has at the top of the first page "Mozarts Werke" and at the bottom "Stich und Druck von Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig". However, also at the top is the incomplete indication 'Serie 24 No.     ', perhaps suggesting some confusion about the work’s status. In any case, most copies of the Complete Works lack the fascicle containing K.74g including apparently the copy used by Einstein as the basis for the slightly revised reprint edition of the Complete Works published in Ann Arbor after World War II. Thus copies of K.74g are extremely hard to locate and it has sunk into obsctuity; and although in K3 Einstein had expressed no doubts about the authenticity of K.74g, K3 relegated it to the appendix of doubtful and spurious works, without offering any explanation. Although he did not say so in as many words, Einstein thought that he heard in this work sounds that Mozart had absorbed during his travels in Italy in 1770, and the number 74g therefore represents the early summer of 1771 when Mozart spent a little over four months in Salzburg between his first and second trips to Italy. We will not repeat here our cautions about the dangers of such methods of dating and authentication. Instead we must pursue another line of reasoning, the main points of which we owe to a closely-reasoned article by G. Allroggen (see bibliography). The situation of K.74g is similar to that of several other symphonies that were at first known only by their incipits, and then rediscovered in non-authoritative copies. In two cases (K.l9a and 45a) authoritative sources have reappeared confirming Wolfgang's authorship. In another case (K.AC11.06/A219) a lost symphony re-emerged in a source strongly suggesting that it was the work of Leopold Mozart. A few more are still missing. In addition, several others - some listed in the Breitkopf Manuscript Catalogue, some not - available to Köchel only through non-authoritative manuscript copies, he placed among the authentic works (K.42a/76, 73l/81, 73m/97, 73n/95, 73q/84, 75 and 111b/96). The important point here is this: the reasons for accepting or rejecting the authenticity of the lastnamed seven symphonies and the subsequently rediscovered K.45b are the same as those for accepting or rejecting K.74g: while the style of all these works is close enough to Mozart' s not to rule out his authorship out of hand, their provenance remains unclear. By any principles of logical consistency, therefore, either all of these symphonies must be placed among the doubtful works, or K.74g must be included arnong the probably authentic ones. For purposes of this recording project, we have chosen the latter option. The listing of K.74g in the Breitkopf Manuscript Catalogue indicates that the symphony calls for two flutes and two horns, whereas the Berlin parts that constitute the work's only surviving source have oboes in place of flutes. Since no autograph exists to resolve this discrepancy, for this recording - apparently the first to be issued of this unjustly neglected work - we have used flutes in the andante and oboes in the other movements, following a practice found in a few other Mozart symphonies (K.43, 73, 75b/110, 173dA/182). Symphony in G major, K.425a (444, AA53) Here is yet another symphony with an odd history. Among Mozart's papers at his death was the score of a symphony, containing a slow introduction, the following allegro and half of the andante in Mozart's hand, but the rest of the andante, the minuet and trio, and the finale in another hand. The work appeared in K1 as ntunber 444, and was published in the Old Complete Works as Symphony No. 37. It has been frequently performed as such in the 20th century, despite the fact that as early as 1907 the work - minus its slow introduction - was shown by Perger to be a symphony by Michael Haydn, written for the installation of a new abbot at the Michaelbeuern Monastery in May 1783. Jahn and Köchel stated that Mozart wrote K.425a during his visit to Linz in 1783, when on the return journey to Vienna from Salzburg he unexpectedly had to give a concert. There he composed a symphony in a few days because, as he wrote to his father, 'I do not have a single symphony with me.' (If we take this statement literally then Mozart did not have Michael Haydn's symphony with him either.) But the origin of the notion that K.425a was written in Linz was that André thought that it was the 'Linz' symphony. By the time the true 'Linz' symphony (K425) was identified, everyone had lost track of why K.425a had originally been connected with Linz, and a myth was born. Thus every Mozart biography, as well as K6, place K.425a in Linz (as we ourselves have done in previous volumes). Our rejection of this idea is supported by the researches of Alan Tyson, which show that K.425a is written on a type of paper used by Mozart immediately after his return from Salzburg to Vienna. The previously unquestioned association of K.425a with Linz is thus specious, and we must search for another explanation as to how and when Mozart acquired the work and why he provided it with a slow introduction. Mozart needed many symphonies for the extraordinary number of concerts he gave inVienna in the early 1780s. We know that he not only used both recent and older symphonies of his own, but also symphonies by other composers. Adalbert Gyrowetz, for instance, related in his (third-person) autobiography that when, as a young man, he arrived in Vienna in 1785, he visited Mozart, ...and was received by him in the friendliest way; cheered by his affability and kindness, he asked him to cast a glance at his youthful works, which consisted of six symphonies, and to give him his opinion of them. Mozart, like the kind-hearted man that he was, agreed to his request, looked the pieces through, praised them, and promised the young artist that he would have one of these symphonies performed at his concert in the music room in the Mehlgrube, where Mozart was giving six subscription concerts; this took place on Thursday. The symphony was performed in the music room in the Mehlgrube by the full theatre orchestra, and received general applause. Mozart with his innate goodness of heart took the young artist by the hand and presented him to the audience as the author of the symphony...' Leopold Mozart, who was present at the first of these Lenten concerts in the Mehlgrube, reported to Nannerl that, 'The concert was incomparable, the orchestra splendid. In addition to the symphonies, a female singer of the Italian theatre sang two arias. Then there was a splendid new piano concerto by Wolfgang...'. Mozart's search for new symphonies was undoubtedly the reason for his jotting down the incipits of three symphonies by Joseph Haydn on the back of a sheet of music paper upon which he had written out a cadenza for the slow movement of the C major piano concerto, K.387b/415 (and not K.246, as stated in K6), which dates from the winter of 1782-3. K6 suggests that Joseph Haydn incipits are connected with a letter of 15 May 1784 in which Wolfgang remarked to Leopold, 'I really have his [Haydn's] three newest symphonies'. But Mozart's three incipits are of symphonies dating from c1779, 1772 and c1780 (nos. 75, 47 and 62 respectively), which can hardly be called Haydn’s newest; the Hoboken catalogue of Haydn's works would suggest that the symphonies mentioned in Mozart's letter should be nos. 76, 77 and 78, all dating from 1782. However, the statement in Mozart' s letter is part of a discussion of the untrustworthiness of Salzburg copyists who apparently made additional copies for their own use. If Mozart gave as proof of the dishonesty of Salzburg copyists (one of whom he names) the fact that he had been able to obtain illicit copies of the newest symponies of 'Haydn', we must of course understand that he meant the Salzburg Haydn: Michael, not Joseph. Michael Haydn’s three newest symponies as of May 1784 were these: Symphony in G major, Perger no. 16, dated 23 May 1783 Symphony in Eb major, Perger no. 17, dated 14 August 1783 Symphony in Bb major, Perger no. 18, dated 12 March 1784. I believe that these three symphonies were the ones that Mozart obtained as the result of dishonest Salzburg copyists. The first of them is the very one for which we provided a slow introduction (K.425a); if he lacked the time or inclination to write a new symphony for his Viennese concerts, he could hardly have chosen a finer work by someone else to spruce up. This symphony helps us to understand the high regard in which Mozart and his father held Michael Haydn’s music. Symphony in G minor, K.550 In the vast literature about Mozart’s life and music, there are several monographs, dozens of articles, hundreds of book chapters, and thousands of programme notes devoted to the last three symphonies (K.543, 550 and 551), which were completed in 1788 in the space of about three months. What one gleans from reading a generous sample of these writings may be summarized thus: we do not know for what occasions the three works were composed, so they were probably the result of an inner artistic compulsion rather than an external stimulus; the three works were intended as a trilogy; Mozart never heard these masterpieces performed dtuing his lifetime and this shows how unappreciated he was by his contemporaries. However, an investigation of these assertions shows that some of them are incorrect or at least misleading. Anyone who has examined the psychology of Mozart's methods of composing knows that, although he could sometimes compose with lightning speed, he also had problems with procrastination, on occasion was depressed and found it difficult to compose, and frequently was painfully busy giving lessons and concerts to support his family. There are plenty of documented examples suggesting that he seldom launched a large-scale work without a clear use for it in mind, and that, when a commission or opportunity for performance or publication dried up, he would sometimes abandon a work in mid-course. This being the case, it would be surprising if Mozart had composed three large symphonies with no practical goal in mind, and in this instance, we know of three such possible goals. Perhaps the most immediate goal in composing some if not all of the three symphonies was that Mozart had scheduled a series of subscription concerts for June and July 1788. It seems that only the first of these concerts actually took place after which, owing to an insufficient number of subscribers, the rest were cancelled. This was to be the last time that Mozart attempted to put on a public concert in Vienna. Another goal is revealed by the number three itself. Sets of symphonies were customarily sold in manuscript or engraved editions in groups of three (for larger symphonies) or in groups of six (for smaller ones). Mozart and his father had prepared several sets of six symphonies earlier in his career, and in 1784 Mozart himself had made up a set of three for publication. We cannot doubt that Mozart hoped to publish K.543, 550 and 551 as an 'opus', although in fact they remained unpublished until after his death. The final goal was that in 1788 Mozart was trying to arrange (and not for the first time) a trip to London, perhaps at the urging of his British friends Anna and Stephen Storace, Thomas Attwood, and Michael Kelly. It was well-known among musicians on the Continent that a talented composer-performer could make more money in London than anywhere else, and - as Haydn was to show in his visits to London in the early 1790s - producing good symphonies was an important element in such a venture. When the English tour fell through, Mozart's three symphonies provided music for a German tour he made in 1789 to give concerts and to seek patronage and perhaps a permanent post. An examination of what is known of Mozart's orchestral concerts on this tour and those after his return to Vienna will lay to rest the notion that the last three symphonies were not performed during his lifetime. A concert at the Dresden Court (14 April) included a piano concerto, and, although the rest of the programme is rmkown, it may very well also have included at least one symphony. A reaction to this event survives, for the Russian ambassador attended Mozart's concert, engaged him to compete on the organ and fortepiano with a local keyboard-player named Hässler, and later summarized the objections of some contemporaries to Mozart - objections which he himself apparently did not share: 'Mozart is very learned, very difficult, consequently he is very much esteemed by instrumentalists; but he seems never to have had the good fortune to have loved. No modulation ever issued from his heart.' A copy of the programme of Mozart’s concert of 12 May in the Leipzig Gewandhaus survives. lt is reproduced below with indications of the probable identity of the pieces: Part I Symphony. Scena. Mme. Duscheck (K.505). Concerto, on the Pianoforte (K.456). Symphony. Part II Concerto, on the Pianoforte (K.503). Scena. Mme. Duscheck (K.528). Fantasy, on the Pianoforte (K.475). Symphony Although it would be tempting to suppose that Mozart’s last symphonies were all performed on this occasion (raising interesting questions about the endurance of the orchestra and the audience), it is more likely that Mozart followed a custom of some of his Viennese concerts, dividing a symphony and using the opening movements at the beginning of the concert and the finale at the end. Thus Leipzig probably heard one or perhaps two of the last symphonies. The Leipzig music critic, Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, who met Mozart and attended this concert and the rehearsal for it, later published a reminiscence of the occasion in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, of which he was for many years the editor: 'When I went to the rehearsal the next day, I noticed to my astonishment that the first movement being rehearsed - it was the allegro of a symphony of his - he took very, very fast. Hardly twenty bars had been played and - as might easily be foreseen - the orchestra started to slow down and the tempo dragged. Mozart stopped, explained what they were doing wrong, cried out 'Ancora', and began again just as fast as before. The result was the same. He did everything to maintain the same tempo; once he beat time so violently with his foot that one of his finely-worked steel shoebuckles broke into pieces: but all to no avail. He laughed at this mishap, left the pieces lying there, cried out 'Ancora' again and started for the third time at the same tempo. The musicians became recalcitrant towards this diminutive deathly pale little man who hustled them in this way: incensed, they continued working at it and now it was all right. Everything that followed he took at a moderate pace. I must admit: I thought then he was rushing it a bit, insisting he was right, not through obstinacy, but in order not to compromise his authority with them right at the very beginning. But after the rehearsal he said in an aside to a few connoisseurs: ’Don't be surprised at me - it wasn’t caprice. But I saw that the majority of the musicians were fairly advanced in years. The dragging would never have stopped if I hadn't first driven them to the limit and made them angry. Now they did their very best through sheer irritation.' As Mozart had never before heard this orchestra play, that showed a fair knowledge of human nature; so he was not, after all, a child in everything outside the realm of music - as people so often say and write.' One would dearly love to believe this charming anecdote, if only Rochlitz didn't have such a terrible reputation for publishing trumped-up documents. In 1790 Mozart, still searching pathetically for patronage and a suitable post, travelled to Frankfurt at his own expense to be present at the festivities surrounding the coronation of Leopold II. A concert he gave there on 15 October is documented by the fullest eye-witness account of any such event that we possess, written by Count Ludwig von Bentheim-Steinfort in his diary: At 11 o’clock in the morning there was a grand concert by Mozart in the auditorium of the National Playhouse. It began with the fine (1) Symphony by Mozart which I have long possessed. (2) Then came a superb Italian aria, 'Non so di chi', which Madame Schick sang with infinite expressiveness. (3) Mozart played a Concerto composed by him which was of an extraordinary prettiness and charm; he had a fortepiano by Stein of Augsburg which must be supreme of its kind and costs from 90 to 100 pounds; this instrument belonged to the Baroness de Frentz. Mozart's playing is a little like that of the late Klöffler, but infinitely more perfect. Monsieur Mozart is a small man of rather pleasant appearance; he had a coat of brown marine satin nicely embroidered; he is engaged at the Imperial Court. (4) The soprano Cecarelli sang a beautiful scena and rondeau, for bravura airs do not appear to be his forte; he had grace and a perfect method; an excellent singer but his tone is a little on the decline, that and his ugly physiognomy; for the rest his passages, ornaments and trills are admirable... In the second act, (5) another concerto by Mozart, which however did not please me like the first. (6) A duet which we possess and I recognized by the passage 'Per te, per te,' with ascending notes... It was a real pleasure to hear these two people, although La Schick lost by comparison with the soprano in the matter of voice and ornaments, but she scored in the passage work at least. (7) A Fantasy without the music by Mozart, very charming, in which he shone infinitely, exhibiting all the power of his talent. (8) The last symphony was not given for it was almost two o'clock and everybody was sighing for dinner. The music thus lasted three hours, which was due to the fact that between all the pieces there were very long pauses. The orchestra was no more than rather weak with five or six violins, but apart from that very accurate: there was only one accursed thing that displeased me very much. There were not many people... During Mozart's last years in Vienna, his concert activities were much reduced compared to those early 1780s, and we are poorly informed about them because, Mozart’s father having died, we do not have a series of informative letters. In fact, the only known occasion on which symphonies were performed was on 16 and 17 April 1791 at the 'Society of Musicians' annual benefit concert, when a large orchestra under the direction of Antonio Salieri performed a 'grand symphony' by Mozart. As Mozart's friends, the clarinettists Johann and Anton Stadler were in the orchestra, the symphony played was perhaps K543 or the second version of K.550 (that recorded here). If we add to the concert activities documented above the evidence of surviving contemporaneous sets of manuscript parts of the last three symphonies, we can confidently lay to rest the myth that these works remained unperformed during his lifetime. © 1982 by Neal Zaslaw