Notes for: July 28, 2009
In Act II of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, you may recall, the Don’s eight-piece wind band entertains him at dinner with a series of operatic excerpts, including a wheezy version of “Non piu andrai” from Mozart’s own Marriage of Figaro. Leporello, the Don’s jaded servant, mutters under his breath: “I’ve heard that one too often.”
As the scene suggests, in Mozart’s day a wind band of six or eight players was a feature of many aristocratic households. Lower on the social scale than string players, the wind players lived and ate with the servants, wore servants’ livery, and doubled at other household tasks. Moreover, while string players were often encouraged to tackle more serious stuff, the wind band’s function was to entertain the master and his guests, often playing band arrangements of popular songs and operatic arias.
Because of their superior carrying quality outdoors, wind instruments were particularly favored for garden parties. For that purpose, an informal genre of music developed for wind bands and mixed ensembles with winds in a dominant role. Whether for indoor or outdoor use, this informal instrumental music was always written for performance as background to leisurely feasting, promenading and idle conversation.
A number of titles were then in fashion for this background music – divertimento, cassation, notturno, and serenade. These forms were virtually interchangeable in content and style, and “divertimento” is often used today as a generic designation for the entire family.
The divertimento style reached the height of its popularity in the middle of the 18th century, about the time of Mozart’s birth. During Mozart’s lifetime, however, it was evolving into more formidable instrumental forms – notably the symphony and the quartet. By the end of the century, in fact, the terms “divertimento” and “cassation” had fallen into disuse, and while the “serenade” was to continue for another century, it was to lose its outdoor connotation and become simply a less formal piece than the ambitious new forms that had emerged.
Mozart’s interest in the divertimento family paralleled this trend. Starting in his 13th year, he composed more than 50 pieces in the divertimento style, under a diversity of titles. By and large, however, they were works of his youth, written while he was still a wunderkind in Salzburg or on tour of European courts, and their intention was to attract and please royal patrons. As Mozart reached maturity, he lost interest in so constricting a framework, and in the final nine years of his life he abandoned it for more rewarding forms.
But before turning his back on the composition of “evening” music, Mozart wrote three remarkable serenades for wind instruments – K. 361, 375 and 388 – which both summarized the best elements of the dying divertimento tradition and transcended its limitations. This evening we hear the second of these remarkable works.
Mozart composed K. 375 in Vienna in October, 1781, in a circuitous but unsuccessful effort to win the ear of Emperor Joseph I, who was fond of wind music while eating dinner. He composed the serenade for pairs of horns, clarinets and bassoons to demonstrate to the emperor his mastery of wind combinations.
Mozart’s intended agent was Johann Kilian von Strack, the court chamberlain who managed the imperial household and supposedly had an influence on the emperor. His plan was to perform the serenade on St. Theresa’s Day (October 15) at the home of Joseph von Hickel, the court painter, in honor of von Hickel’s sister in law named Theresa. Von Strack was a close friend of the Von Hickels, and a frequent visitor in their home. Mozart hoped to have von Strack hear the composition and to recommend it to the emperor for the latter’s harmonie wind group.
The serenade was performed at the von Hickel residence with von Strack in attendance, and at two other locations. The response was so favorable and the musicians so well paid that they performed the work gratis a fourth time – outside Mozart’s residence. In a letter to his father, Mozart wrote, “At eleven o’clock at night, I was serenaded by two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons playing my own music. . . . And so these musicians had the front door opened for them and when they had lined up in the courtyard they gave me, just as I was about to undress for bed, the most delightful surprise in the world with the opening E flat chord.”
As things turned out, von Strack was favorably impressed with Mozart’s music, but could do little to help him. Mozart’s music was too serious and too challenging for the emperor’s dinner music. In the following year, the emperor expanded his harmonie to eight musicians, adding two oboes, and Mozart rewrote the serenade for the enlarged group that we hear this evening. Again, the imperial court showed no interest, and while Mozart continued to submit wind pieces to the palace, so far as is known none of Mozart’s wind compositions ever found a place in the imperial library.
K. 375 is in five movements, the additional movement being a second Menuetto. The first movement begins with a throwback to an old-fashioned convention of the divertimento – an introductory march. In the past, the work was often introduced and concluded by a brief march, played by the musicians to accompany their own entrance and exit. In this case, the movement is ushered in by a march-like series of E flat chords; this motive is repeated at the opening of both the development and the recapitulation.
Aside from this bow to the past, the movement is remarkable for the sheer variety of tonal color that Mozart was able to achieve with only four pairs of wind instruments. Listen, for example, to the march-like motive: The E flat chords are colored by the assignment to each of a distinctive dynamic marking – sf, fp, fp, f and p. This is immediately followed by an innocent downward phrase in the clarinet, repeated several times with a bassoon echo and then gently clashing suspensions for the oboe.
In structural terms, the opening movement is in modified sonata form. The attempt at a formal development section is abandoned after 20 measures of apparently direction-less tonal meandering which sends the music abruptly but briefly into the relative minor. Equally surprising is the new theme that appears during the recapitulation, set for solo horn in gavotte rhythm, and the movement’s pianissimo ending. The first menuet follows, and is notable for its long and weighty trio.
The variety of instrumental color that marks the first movement reaches its high point in the third movement adagio. The long first theme is first shared by the clarinet and oboe, then taken up by the horn, and finally concluded by echoing exchanges between the oboes and clarinets and the bassoon and horn. When the theme is repeated in the recapitulation, the instrumental scoring is completely different. The second menuet is seasoned with hemiolas (blendings of triple and duple rhythm) and a naive-sounding musette-style trio.
The finale is a closely-reasoned account of Mozart’s own favorite formal innovation, the sonata-rondo. As in a rondo, the main theme is repeated as a refrain with intervening episodes. As in sonata form, one of the episodes is a development of the main theme.