By the early 1780s, Mozart was the toast of Vienna, having recently left the employ of Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in his native Salzburg to pursue a highly successful freelance career as a pianist, composer, and teacher in the imperial capital. The freedom of being his own master, and outside the jurisdiction of his domineering father, spurred his creativity, even as a string of public appearances, including a well-publicized “duel” with his rival Muzio Clementi, burnished his fame as a keyboard virtuoso. Recognizing that the Viennese were willing to pay handsomely to attend the subscription concerts on which his livelihood depended, he worked day and night to keep the programs stocked with a fresh supply of music. Visiting Vienna in 1785, his father marveled at Mozart’s unflagging energy. “Every day there are concerts; and the whole time is given up to teaching, music, composing, and so forth. It is impossible for me to describe the hustle and bustle,” Leopold wrote to his daughter in Salzburg. This intensely productive—if only intermittently lucrative—decade saw the creation of Mozart’s greatest piano concertos and operas, as well as a cluster of pathbreaking chamber works, and no fewer than six symphonic masterpieces, not to mention the transcendently beautiful Requiem Mass on which he was working when he died on December 5, 1791.
In 1778, as part of his campaign to stimulate the growth of German-language theater, Austrian emperor Joseph II founded a company devoted to the Singspiel, a popular genre of musical theater with spoken dialogue. It was for this troupe, the Deutsches National Theater, that Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio in 1782 and, four years later, The Impresario. (The Magic Flute, his last and greatest Singspiel, reached the stage under different auspices.) Premiered in the ornate Orangery at Schönbrunn, the Habsburgs’ summer palace outside Vienna, The Impresario (Der Schauspieldirektor) was paired with another frothy musical valentine to the theater world, Antonio Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole (First the Music, Then the Words). Mozart’s sister-in-law, Aloysia Lange, sang a leading role in his satirical vignette, and her onstage competition with a rival prima donna, enacted in a brilliantly virtuosic trio, mirrored the offstage competition between the two composers. Indeed, their works were performed at opposite ends of the 620-foot-long orangery: After whetting their appetites on Mozart’s hors d’oeuvre, spectators literally turned their backs on him to feast on Salieri’s opera buffa.
Although at the time Mozart was working flat-out on his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro, he evidently welcomed the prestigious royal commission for The Impresario, especially as it entailed writing only some 25 minutes’ worth of music (an overture, two arias, a trio, and a finale). In both its length and its musical sophistication, the overture might well have served as a curtain-raiser for a far more substantial drama than this lightweight send-up of backstage bickering at a fictional theater located in—of all places—Salzburg. The atmosphere of histrionic grandiosity evoked by the orchestra’s opening flourishes is soon tempered by music of a more delicate and refined character. Energetic and melodious, the overture flirts with minor-mode seriousness but remains for the most part resolutely buoyant and high-spirited. However trivial the assignment, Mozart couldn’t help giving it his best.
Like Mozart’s Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano (1786) and Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (1789), the Clarinet Concerto in A Major of 1791—his last piece of instrumental music—was inspired by the artistry of the clarinetist Anton Stadler, a star member of the imperial court orchestra in Vienna. The two men met shortly after Mozart’s arrival in 1781 and struck up a friendship that was cemented by their bond as fellow Masons. (Mozart’s love affair with the clarinet had been sparked by hearing the celebrated Mannheim court orchestra play in the late 1770s. He came home convinced that the Salzburg orchestra needed to upgrade its woodwind section. “Ah, if only we had clarinets too!” he wrote to his father. “You cannot imagine the glorious effect of a symphony with flutes, oboes, and clarinets.”) Both the concerto and the quintet showed off the clarinet’s low, or chalumeau, register to good advantage, having been conceived for Stadler’s newly invented basset clarinet, which had two (later four) more keys at the bottom than the standard model. Stadler’s velvety tone and nimble changes of register were widely admired. One contemporary critic was moved to declare: “Never should I have thought that a clarinet could be capable of imitating a human voice as deceptively as it was imitated by you. Truly, the instrument has so soft and so lovely a tone that nobody can resist it who has a heart …”
Although virtuosity is the keynote of the Clarinet Concerto, one would hardly guess it from the simple, sweetly subdued opening theme of the Allegro, first presented by the strings alone. Only gradually does Mozart thicken the musical plot, piling on layers of textural and thematic complexity even as he foregrounds the distinctive timbre and singing quality of the clarinet. Orchestra and soloist take turns in the limelight, each section of the movement elaborating on material presented earlier. The clarinet part is replete with acrobatic leaps, dancing arpeggios, and intricate coloratura passagework. The ensuing Adagio, in D major, is an oasis of calm; the long-breathed, radiantly lyrical melody in the clarinet’s upper register contrasts with the bouncy recurring theme of the final Rondo. Writing in the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1802, an anonymous reviewer summarized the concerto’s virtues this way: “The first Allegro is splendidly crafted and contains almost all of those phrases and coloraturas whereby the skillful clarinetist can shine outstandingly. The emotional man will find in the Adagio more than he needs to communicate and generally to awaken the deepest feeling. Should, however, anyone have neither the knowledge to admire the first movement, nor feeling for the second, he will still, one hopes, be sufficiently amused by the wit and humor, as fine as it is noble, of the third movement, a very pleasing Rondo.”
Thanks largely to Joseph Haydn, with whom Mozart had a warm and mutually admiring relationship, the symphony by the late 18th century had come to be regarded as the most exalted and all-embracing genre of instrumental music. In the words of one contemporary writer, it was uniquely capable of expressing “the grand, the festive, and the sublime.” Mozart’s earliest symphonies date from the mid-1760s, when Leopold escorted the nine-year-old prodigy on a grand tour of European cultural capitals. By the time he relocated to Vienna, he had 34 such works under his belt. The full flowering of genius manifests in his last six symphonies, beginning with the “Haffner” of 1782, which reflected the high standards of the city’s musicians and audiences. As its subtitle implies, the C-Major Symphony was actually composed in Linz, where Mozart and his wife were staying at the home of a local nobleman on their way home from a fruitless peacemaking trip to Salzburg in the fall of 1783. (The newlyweds had hoped to win over Mozart’s father, who strongly disapproved of their marriage.) For the chronically overstretched composer, the three-week layover in Linz was something of a busman’s honeymoon. “On Tuesday, November 4, I am giving a concert in the theater here,” he informed Leopold, “and as I have not a single symphony with me, I am writing a new one at breakneck speed, which must be finished by that time.” Mozart’s fifth-from-last symphony was duly premiered in the city’s Ballhaus (“ball house”), a former tennis court that had been repurposed as a performance venue a few years earlier. He introduced the “Linz” to Viennese audiences the following spring, billing it as “a quite new grand symphony.”
“Grand” is an apt epithet for the “Linz” Symphony, especially as regards the expansive outer movements, where Mozart deploys his symphonic arsenal to imposing effect. The Adagio introduction—with its crisp, double-dotted rhythms, sudden dynamic contrasts, and dramatic use of trumpets and timpani—portends a work of high seriousness. But after landing expectantly on an emphatic G-major chord, Mozart puckishly pivots—as Haydn so often did—to a spirited Allegro that combines martial vigor with rollicking good humor. The slow movement, in leisurely 6/8 meter, transports the listener to the refined, genteel world of aristocratic salons, though the Adagio is not without inklings of tragedy in its ominous drumrolls and twisty, dark-tinged harmonies. The Menuetto, built around a winsome duet for oboe and bassoon in the central trio section, is once again all sweetness, light, and airy innocence, making an effective foil for the devil-may-care vivacity of the Finale. The “Linz,” then, is decidedly grand and festive; but is it also sublime? Hermann Abert, whose 1920 biography of Mozart remains essential reading, offers a useful (if slightly dated) perspective: “As a whole, the symphony cannot, of course, compare with its great successors, yet it nonetheless introduces specifically Mozartian features to the emotional world of the salonesque symphony in the form of manly ardor in characteristic interplay with pensive brooding.”
—Harry Haskell
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