ALAN GILBERTONTHISPROGRAM
Playing the last three symphonies of Mozart
together in a program is a very intense but
very powerful way of experiencing this music.
They were composed within a very compressed period of time, but each is so distinct
and so clearly defined, in terms of the worlds
that Mozart creates in them, that there’s incredible variety and invention among these
three iconic pieces. In the end, they still somehow intrinsically fit together.
For any performer, approaching Mozart is
uniquely challenging. The difficulty lies in
how simple the music seems on the page: the
notes in the score don’t appear ornate or complex in the way, say, they look in one by
Strauss. Nevertheless, working with that relatively spare amount of information you have
to develop a rich idea of what the music is
about. The interpretation has to be stylish and
shaped but, ultimately, human and natural. You
have to tell the story that’s in the music: the
story of Mozart is everybody’s story.
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NOTESONTHEPROGRAM
BY JAMES M. KELLER, PROGRAM ANNOTATOR
The Leni and Peter May Chair
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
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
W
olfgang Amadeus Mozart’s biography
contains such an amazing procession
of extraordinary experiences and achievements that it reads almost like an 18thcentury novel. One might think it was all
made up; but then, of course, there’s the inescapable evidence that he did live and
breathe — and write music unlike anything
produced before, during, or after his lifetime.
The story of his final three symphonies occupies a full chapter of this life-as-novel. More
than two centuries after they were written,
Mozart’s Symphonies No. 39 in E-flat major,
No. 40 in G minor, and No. 41 in C major,
Jupiter, stand at the summit of the symphonic
repertoire, where they keep company with a
small and supremely select group of masterpieces by A-list composers.
Mozart, however, seems to have scarcely
broken a sweat in writing them. Incredibly, all
three of these symphonies were produced in
the space of about nine weeks in the summer
of 1788. He began writing Symphony No. 39
around the beginning of June, not quite a
month after Don Giovanni received a lukewarm reception at its Vienna premiere. He
finished the E-flat-major Symphony on
June 26, and went on to complete the succeeding symphonies on July 25 and August
10. Each is a full-scale, four-movement work
in the late Classical style, unlike the threemovement Symphony No. 38, Prague, which
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IN SHORT
Born: January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 5, 1791, in Vienna
Works composed and premiered: composed
in the summer of 1788 — Symphony No. 39 in
June (completed June 26), Symphony No. 40
from then through July 25, Symphony No. 41
from July 25 through August 10. A recently
uncovered document reveals that Symphony
No. 40 was played in a concert organized by
Baron Gottfried van Swieten, although no date is
given. Antonio Salieri conducted the Symphony
No. 40 at the Burgtheater in Vienna on April 16-17,
1791, with instrumentation slightly revised from
the original version. Premieres of Symphonies
Nos. 39 and 41 are unknown.
New York Philharmonic premieres and most
recent performances: Symphony No. 39, premiered January 9, 1847, Henry C. Timm, conductor; most recently played June 9, 2012, Pinchas
Zukerman, conductor. Symphony No. 40, premiered
April 25, 1846, Henry C. Timm, conductor; most
recently performed October 7, 2006, at Baker Hall
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Lorin Maazel, conductor. Symphony No. 41, premiered January 13,
1844, Denis G. Etienne, conductor; most recently
performed March 3, 2010, Alan Gilbert, conductor
Estimated durations: Symphony No. 39, ca. 28
minutes; Symphony No. 40, ca. 24 minutes;
Symphony No. 41, ca. 30 minutes
Mozart had written two years earlier. Twelve
movements in nine weeks would mean that,
on the average, Mozart expended five days
and a few hours on the composition of each
movement. That doesn’t figure in the fact
that he was writing other pieces at the same
time, or that he was also giving piano lessons,
tending a sick wife, enduring the death of a
six-month-old daughter, entertaining friends,
moving to a new apartment, and begging his
fellow freemason Michael Puchberg for assistance that might see him and his family
through what was turning into an extended
financial crisis.
In one of his beseeching letters to Puchberg, Mozart mentioned that he had hopes
for some income from two concerts that
were to take place in the Vienna Casino the
following week. But none of the city’s newspapers made mention of the concerts, and it
seems probable that they were cancelled due
to lack of audience interest. If they did take
place, Mozart was apparently not encouraged
by them, for it appears that he never performed in public thereafter, except to conduct
opera. A 2011 article by the musicologist Milada Jonášová introduced a newly discovered
document revealing that the G-minor Symphony was played in a concert under the patronage of Mozart’s friend, Baron Gottfried
van Swieten. Although the document does
not say when the concert took place, the
piece may have been written for this event
rather than for the Casino concerts. The Mozart
scholar Christoph Wolff states in his new book,
Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune, that “it
makes sense to assume that all three symphonies were intended for presentation in the
concert series organized by van Swieten.”
Mozart’s triptych represents his last word
in the medium of the symphony, which itself
was among the supreme musical advances of
the 18th century. He undoubtedly had every
A Memorable Minuet-and-Trio
The third movement Menuetto of Mozart’s
Symphony No. 39 is unusually boisterous —
a sort of peasant’s minuet — and the contrasting Trio contains one of the composer’s
most endearing dance tunes, a lilting melody
from the first clarinet with delightful echo effects from the flute, all above a murmuring
accompaniment from the second clarinet.
Mozart scholar Neal Zaslaw, currently
supervising an overhaul and updating of the
Köchel catalogue, which is the definitive guide
to all matters Mozartean, says that this Trio
is not merely in the style of a Ländler (an
Alpine folk dance which is the forerunner of
the waltz) … but is actually based on a real
one, given out by a pair of clarinets, which
were favorite Alpine village instruments.
expectation of living well into the 19th century; and although that is not what happened,
at least he had another three and a half years
in which he might well have written further
symphonies. But since he didn’t, these works
stand as the apex of his achievement in symphonic music, and in their strikingly different characters they not only draw together
developments that had enriched his orchestral music to that point but also offer hints of
what the future might have held.
These three symphonies have been
minutely analyzed over the years — especially Nos. 40 and 41 — and they have
proved so rich in their structural details that
the analytical conversation continues at full
force to this day. One can dissect their harmonic structures, their deployment of
themes, their contrapuntal subtlety, and the
mastery of their instrumentation and yet fail
to convey the exceptionally well-wrought
personalities that each makes evident even at
first hearing. Each is sublimely beautiful, but
elicits a very different response.
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Like the Prague Symphony, Symphony
No. 39 opens grandly, with a slow, darkly
dramatic introduction in which the orchestral
texture and the harmonic dissonance increase
to near the breaking point. (The composer is
very much in Don Giovanni territory here.)
This gives way to a lyrical Allegro in which
buoyancy rubs shoulders with measured
grace. The movement’s two main themes are
set apart by both their contrasting melodic
character and their instrumentation; the first
is conceived for the strings, while the second
employs the rich texture of Mozart’s beloved
clarinets — two of them, playing in thirds.
The dotted rhythms of the introduction appear again in the slow movement, a subtle
Andante con moto. Mozart employed a modest
instrumentation for this symphony, but the
second movement grows still more economical by foreswearing the trumpets and timpani. The resultant intimacy suggests
chamber music, especially in light of the delicate writing for one-on-a-part winds.
Often the third movement is the least
memorable in a Classical symphony, perhaps
with a throwaway minuet that serves only to
cleanse the palate between the more imposing courses of the slow movement and the finale. But in Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, the
third movement may be the most memorable, thanks especially to its irresistible Trio
section. Still, it steals none of the finale’s
thunder. In this final movement, a single
theme undergoes all manner of rhythmic and
contrapuntal exploration, very much à la
Haydn, without ever coming off as recherché.
The Salieri Connection
Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 figured on a program of
April 16-17, 1791, in Vienna, conducted by the distinguished Antonio Salieri, who had been named
Kapellmeister of the Vienna Court in 1788, the same
year Mozart composed his last three symphonies. To
many music lovers the mention of Salieri inevitably
brings to mind the stories that make him complicit in
Mozart’s death, myths that proved potent to Romantic
imaginations of the 19th century and that fueled Peter
Shaffer’s marvelous play Amadeus (which, from the
moment it was premiered in 1979, people have had
trouble remembering that it is a work of fiction).
It would be hard to find a reputable historian today
who finds the legend that Salieri committed murder
anything less than preposterous, although Mozart could
be suspicious of Salieri, and several of his letters underscore that he felt the composer sometimes tried to
undermine his endeavors. Whether or not his suspicions were well founded, things had gotten onto a more
The rival? F. Murray Abraham as Antonio
Salieri in the 1984 film Amadeus
collegial track by 1791. Six months after Salieri conducted the G-minor Symphony, he accompanied Mozart
to a performance of the latter’s newly unveiled opera The Magic Flute, to which he reacted with
demonstrative enthusiasm. Following Mozart’s tragically early death, almost certainly the result
of rheumatic inflammatory fever (or “military fever,” as it was known at the time), the composer’s widow sent their elder son, Franz Xaver, to take music lessons from Salieri.
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Symphony No. 40 is a work of Sturm
und Drang, one that seems almost to depict
inner demons as it ranges from the quirky
and the unsettling to the downright terrifying. Mozart had traced a suggestion of this
territory 15 years earlier in his Symphony
No. 25 (K.183/173dB), also in G minor.
That work was a fine achievement, arguably
the earliest of his symphonies that modern
music lovers would be very dejected about
doing without.
Mozart was right to esteem it. In 1783 he
wrote from Vienna asking his father back
home in Salzburg to send the music for that
“Little” G-minor Symphony, and it is not
difficult to imagine him revisiting the work
when he came to write the No. 40. These
would be the only two symphonies he composed in minor keys (an early D-minor one,
not included among his canonical symphonies, was just the overture extracted from
his oratorio La Betulia liberata), and in the earlier of the two he had already worked out essential harmonic and structural implications
gained by composing a symphony in the
minor mode. The Symphony No. 40 marks
an immense advance in the richness and generosity of themes, the intense effect of chromaticism, and the overall expressivity born
of masterly symphonic orchestration. It links
the sentiments of the 18th century to those
of the 19th, and as such it was one of the
rather few large-scale works by Mozart to
remain steadfastly in the repertoire through
the Romantic era.
In Symphony No. 41, which later picked
up the nickname Jupiter, Mozart seems intent
on showing off his sheer brilliance as a composer. Its emotional range is wide indeed,
prefiguring the sort of vast, expressive canvas
that would emerge in the symphonies of
Beethoven. In this work’s finale Mozart renders the listener slack-jawed through a breathtaking display of quintuple counterpoint, and
that in itself may be viewed as looking both
backward — to the sort of contrapuntal virtuosity associated with Bach and Handel —
and forward, to the dramatic power of fugue
that is demonstrated in many of Beethoven’s
greatest compositions.
What’s in a Name?
As with so many musical nicknames, the one for Mozart’s
Symphony No. 41 did not originate with the composer. Vincent
Novello, the English composer and publisher, visited Mozart’s
widow and their son Franz Xaver in 1829. Novello recounted:
“Mozart’s son said he considered the finale to his father’s
Sinfonia in C — which Salomon christened the Jupiter — to be
the highest triumph of Instrumental Composition, and I agree
with him.”
Novello would have been referring here to the German
violinist Johann Peter Salomon, who established himself as an
impresario in London and who arranged Joseph Haydn’s two
residencies in Great Britain in the 1790s. This origin of the
“Jupiter” nickname rings true, as the earliest concert programs
to use the word were Scottish and English, and the first
printed edition to put it on the title page was a piano
transcription of the symphony published in London in 1823.
A drawing of Mozart, 1789
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The Jupiter Symphony quickly earned a
reputation as a work of exceptional qualities.
In 1798, a reviewer for Leipzig’s Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung referred to Mozart’s “formidable Symphony in C major, in which, as
is well known, he came on a little too
strong.” But soon commentators adopted
tones of almost universal adulation. By the
time Georg Nikolaus von Nissen published
his groundbreaking Mozart biography, in
1828, the tenor was firmly set: “His great
Symphony in C with the closing fugue is
truly the first of all symphonies,” declared
Von Nissen. “In no work of this kind does
the divine spark of genius shine more
brightly and beautifully.”
Instrumentation: Symphony No. 39 calls for
flute, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns,
two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Symphony
No. 40 employs flute, two oboes, two bassoons,
two horns, and strings. Symphony No. 41 requires flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two
horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
At the Time
In 1788, when Mozart was writing his Symphony Nos. 39, 40, and 41, the following events were
taking place:
In the United States, over the course of the year more than eight
states ratify the Constitution (left) and enter the Union; New York
City is designated as the country’s first federal capital; in New Orleans, a fire destroys much of the city and kills 25 percent of its population.
In England, King George III demonstrates his first extended episode
of mental instability, which causes a crisis in Parliament; in London,
the newspaper The Daily Universal Register changes its name to The
Times,.
In France, the Day of Tiles revolt
takes place in Grenoble, an event
that is seen as one of the first that
would lead to the French Revolution; Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun paints
Marie Antoinette (far left); and Antoine-François Callet paints Portrait
of Louis XVI (left).
— The Editors
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