Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major, K. 299
Performances: Feb 16/17, 2008

I declare to you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name. - Joseph Haydn, to Leopold Mozart.

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.

            Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major, K299, was commissioned by Duc de Guines, an amateur flautist, to perform with his daughter, who was something of a harp prodigy.  Guines was hardly a good patron for Mozart, using Baron Melchior Grimm as an intermediary and often paying late.  (Grimm’s support of Mozart had waned and would eventually turn volatile, so Grimm’s presence in this commission was particularly unsettling.)  Mozart opted for a livelier sinfonia concertante rather than a true double concerto, creating a prominent role for the orchestra and lively interplay between horns, oboes and soloists in the finale.  Mozart didn’t consider it his best effort, but he nonetheless wrote with unusual care to blend this unusual combination of solo instruments.  The melodies are timeless, with the most striking melody found in the second movement, where, after a moment of hesitating, halting, even deliberately clumsy writing, Mozart bursts forth into one of the most beautiful, graceful, and recognizable phrases in all of Classical music.