PROGRAM NOTES

Wolfgang Mozart - Selections from Divertimento in D Major, K. 131

Wolfgang Mozart Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria. Died December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria.

Composition History Mozart composed this divertimento in the summer of 1772. The date of the first performance is not known. At these concerts, movements 1, 2, 5, and 6 are performed. The score calls for flute, oboe, bassoon, four horns, and strings. Performance time is approximately nineteen minutes.

Performance History

These are the Chicago ’s first subscription concert performances of Mozart’s Divertimento in D major, K. 131. The Orchestra first performed this work at the Ravinia Festival on August 8, 1973, with Lawrence Foster conducting, and most recently on July 23, 1977, with James Levine conducting.

Selections from Divertimento in D Major, K. 131

Mozart’s first compositions, an Andante and an Allegro for keyboard, were written down by Leopold, one of history’s proudest stage fathers, when Wolfgang was just five years old. Even earlier, the boy had tried to write what he called a concerto in his own system of notation, which, as a family friend recalled, consisted mainly of a “smudge of notes, most of which were written over inkblots that he had rubbed out.” After 1761, began to flow, with increasing frequency, from his little hands. Inevitably, despite Wolfgang’s astonishing talent—“Everyone whom I have heard says that his genius is incomprehensible,” Leopold wrote when his son was only six—many of the earliest works in his official catalog are little more than child’s play.

Eventually, however, signs of Wolfgang’s true promise and unique, once-in-a-generation gift began to emerge. Of the first three hundred numbers in Köchel’s famous catalog, most of them identifying compositions written before Mozart turned twenty-one, a handful of works stand out. K. 183, a remarkable symphony in G minor—his twenty-fifth, according to the standard numbering—is the earliest of his to have found a place in the standard repertory. K. 271, a piano concerto known as the Jeunnehomme, is the first of Mozart’s landmark pieces in that form that is still regularly played today. (It is sometimes said to mark his musical coming-of-age.) There are other notable works from these years— Exsultate, jubilate for soprano and orchestra; the Haffner , the Turkish Violin Concerto—all of which have appeared on Chicago Symphony programs over the years.

With the single exception of Mozart’s first symphony (K. 16), the divertimento performed this week is the earliest music by Mozart the Chicago Symphony has played—both this work and the divertimento for strings heard here last season were composed when Mozart was just sixteen. As with many of Mozart’s first efforts in big public forms, we don’t know anything about the occasion for which he was writing. The pieces Mozart labeled divertimento, serenade, cassation, and notturno were all written to provide instant gratification, and as with so much of the music from this period, they were performed just once, at a public ceremony or high society event, and then forgotten. As a result, many have disappeared without a trace; we are probably lucky this early divertimento has survived at all. (In 1757, the year after Wolfgang was born, his father Leopold boasted that he had written more than thirty pieces of serenade music; just one, recently discovered at that, is known today.) It is all the more remarkable that this D major divertimento, which Mozart clearly didn’t expect to live beyond its “premiere,” was written with the finesse, invention, and stylishness he would regularly lavish on operas and big-scale works he hoped might have a life of their own.

The divertimento performed this week is often said to be the earliest serenade-style work in which Mozart’s distinctive voice emerges. Maynard Solomon, our finest Mozart biographer today, suggests it may have been written to be played at a wedding, since the slow movement has the character of a serenader’s love song. The score holds no other clues about its origins or function; the word “divertimento” written on the autograph score is not even in Mozart’s own hand. It may have well been composed for an important public event, since the scoring calls for four horns, not standard serenade personnel, and Mozart’s writing for them is highly demanding. (Salzburg boasted a very fine horn player, Ignaz Leutgeb, for whom Mozart later wrote his well-known concertos; it is likely he played the first horn part in this work.) The score is a loose collection of six movements. Like many of Mozart’s earliest Salzburg entertainments, it doesn’t have the architectural unity of the later symphonies, and for this week’s performances, Nicholas Kraemer has selected four movements, just as any eighteenth-century impresario might have done, to suit the occasion at hand. In addition to the opening and closing movements, which call for the full ensemble, Mr. Kramer has chosen the serenader’s lovely Adagio, for strings alone, and a minuet with two trios, which continually moves the spotlight throughout the ensemble.

Phillip Huscher is the program annontator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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