Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) showed such a prodigious talent
for music in his early childhood that his father, also a composer, dropped
all other ambitions and devoted himself to educating the boy and exhibiting
his accomplishments.
Between ages six and fifteen, Mozart was on tour over half the time.
By 1762, he was a virtuoso on the clavier - an early keyboard instrument
and predecessor of the piano-and soon became a good organist and violinist
as well.
He produced his first minuets at the age of six, and his first symphony
just before his ninth birthday, his first oratorio at eleven, and his first
opera at twelve.
His final output would total more than 600 compositions.
Much has already been said and studied in the popular media about Mozart's
roguish lifestyle and apprehension of conformity.
It was this aspect of his personality that never won him the support of
royalty or the church, which, at that time, was critical to any composer's
survival.
As such, Mozart died young, ill, poor, and relatively unappreciated ...
only to become the mostly widely acknowledged orchestral composer in history.
In 1772, at the tender age of 16, Mozart was in the midst
of years of European excursions with his father, Leopold.
In October of that year, they set out for Italy and
heard Mozart's new opera Lucio Silla (K.135)
performed to widespread success.
Mozart was rather impressed with one of the Italian
male sopranos who took part in the opera, and composed
Exsultate Jubilate, K.165 for him.
This piece is billed as a motet for soprano accompanied
by strings and organ continuo, but its character is even
more like a concerto for voice and orchestra, given its fast-slow-fast,
three-movement concerto form.
It's amazing to consider a work as vibrant as
Mozart's Flute Concerto No. 2 in D Major, K.314,
through an odd lens:
this was not a labor of love for Mozart.
In fact, Mozart wrote most of his wind concerti as
bread-and-butter commissions to pay bills, and there is no
evidence of this stronger than K.314.
The work exists in two forms:
the flute concerto in D Major,
and
the oboe concerto in C major.
In Mannheim, at the beginning of 1778, Mozart received
a commission from a Dutch flautist named Dejean to write
three concertos and two quartets for flute, a perfunctory
task that bothered Mozart greatly.
During the summer of 1777, Mozart had written an oboe
concerto for Giuseppe Ferlendis, a virtuoso from Salzburg.
This score was thought to be lost, but when its
separate parts were discovered in the Salsburg Mozarteum in 1920,
it was noticed that the oboe concerto in C was
none other than a first version of the flute concerto in D.
Mozart, pressed for time, had not written a second
concerto, but merely transposed the oboe concerto with only
the smallest modifications to suit the flute.
Speaking of his Serenade in E-flat Major, K.375, Mozart wrote in a letter to
his father on November 3, 1781: "I wrote this music on St. Theresa's
Day -- for the ... sister-in-law of Herr von Hickl, the court painter,
at whose house it was performed for the first time. ...
The chief reason why I wrote it was in order to let Herr von Strack,
who goes there every day, hear something of my composition.
And so I wrote it rather carefully. I was applauded by all, too.
On St. Theresa's night it was performed in three different places."
Strack was the Emperor's valet-de-chambre, and it's clear that Mozart
was hoping to win a position in the court of Joseph II, who eventually
set up a wind band but didn't hire Mozart and relegated the band to playing
transcriptions of operas and ballets.
Nonetheless, Mozart's "careful" writing produced a masterpiece of the wind
repertoire in five movements -- all in the home key of E-flat Major to
accommodate the valveless horn of the period -- that evokes the masterful
symmetry and playfulness typical of his serenades and divertimenti.
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