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Thank you for your support. juilliard.edu The Juilliard School presents Juilliard415 Monica Huggett, Director and Violin David Belkovski, Fortepiano Friday, January 18, 2019, 7:30pm Peter Jay Sharp Theater WOLFGANG AMADEUS Divertimento in D Major, K.136 (1772) MOZART Allegro (1756-91) Andante Presto Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491 (1786) Allegro Larghetto Allegretto David Belkovski, Fortepiano Intermission Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551, “Jupiter” (1788) Allegro vivace Andante cantabile Menuetto: Allegretto—Trio Molto allegro Performance time: approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, including an intermission Juilliard's full-scholarship Historical Performance program was established and endowed in 2009 by the generous support of Bruce and Suzie Kovner. This performance is supported, in part, by the Muriel Gluck Production Fund. Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. 1 Notes on the Program By James M. Keller Mozart: Divertimento in D Major, K. 136 (1772) The D-major Divertimento is one of three roughly similar works that, in the Wolfgang Amadeus composer’s manuscript, are headed with the words “di Wolfgango Amadeo Mozart Mozart Salisburgo 1772.” That leaves no doubt that Mozart wrote them in his home town of Salzburg (Italianized as “Salisburgo”), and historical Born: evidence suggests that they must date from the early months of that January 27, 1756, year—at about the time he was 15 going on 16. Each piece is also headed in Salzburg, Austria with the inscription Divertimento I (or II or III), but the most commonly employed modern editions present them under the competing names Born: “Three Divertimentos” and “Three Salzburg Symphonies Without Winds.” December 5, 1791, in Vienna, Austria This piece has also long been claimed as a piece of chamber music. The sparkling figuration of 16th-notes that fills the first-violin part in the first movement (and sometimes the second-violin part as well) may seem envisaged for a virtuoso soloist rather than an entire orchestral section. If this was intended to be a string quartet, was it even for a quartet comprising two violins, viola, and cello? The score doesn’t mention a cello; the lowest line is simply labeled basso, which could refer to the fact that it functions as the bass line or perhaps that it was to be played by a double bass. The combination of two violins, viola, and double bass was a standard ensemble in Mozart’s Austria, documented in pictures as well as in music and sometimes known as a “divertimento quartet.” These chamber-musical assemblages may have bearing on how one chooses to treat the piece even when it is presented in an orchestral guise; a conductor could dispense with cellos entirely and simply use multiple players of the “divertimento quartet” configuration, or consider it a scaled-up standard string quartet (with first and second violin, viola, and cello sections but no double basses), or treat it as a string symphony in all its fullness, with cellos and double basses doubling each other at the octave on that bottom line. For a piece that on the surface seems entirely guileless, this divertimento or symphony or whatever it is raises some pretty basic issues, and a conductor has to take a stand about how to present it. The character of the piece will certainly vary depending on the performing forces chosen, but its appeal remains no matter what: a brilliant opening Allegro, a gentle Andante with an Italianate musical accent, and a sonata-form finale in which the contrapuntal pretensions of the development section are likely to make listeners smile broadly as they cheer the composer along the path toward his musical maturity. 2 Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491 (1786) Mozart signaled the completion of his C-minor Piano Concerto by entering it into his Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke (Catalogue of All My Works) on March 24, 1786. Its brooding darkness makes it unique among Mozart’s concertos. Only one other is in a minor key—the Piano Concerto in D Minor (K.466), of 1785—and that one, though a favorite of ensuing generations of emotionally susceptible Romantics, actually ends with more than a whiff of major-key merriment. Not so the C-minor, the overriding sentiment of which might be described as despairing. Of course, this is not raw despair that is put on display; we can depend on Mozart to temper it with a certain measure of elegance. In so doing, he renders it all the more poignant. He probably unveiled it on April 7, 1786, at Vienna’s Burgtheater, in the last in a series of annual benefit concerts (meaning the box-office receipts would benefit the composer) that Mozart had given in Vienna since 1783. There is no question that a piano concerto figured on that program, and the practical logic connecting the completion of such a work to a solo appearance two weeks later is well-nigh impeccable. He was very likely the soloist. The autograph reveals a working style that can be found elsewhere in pieces he wrote to spotlight himself: by and large, the orchestral lines are written out fully, but the piano part sometimes disintegrates into shorthand, as if to merely remind the composer about how his not-yet-notated piece was to proceed. When he eventually got around to “filling out” the piano part, he sometimes found himself trying to cram too many notes into too little space on the physical page. The resulting text has challenged editors ever since with a number of obscurities, including a few conflicting harmonizations. Even tempo indications are a matter of speculation. The composer clearly marked the first movement Allegro on his manuscript, but the notations of Larghetto and Allegretto at the beginning of the second and third movements are in a hand other than Mozart’s. This is the only Mozart piano concerto to use both oboes and clarinets; in fact, we find here the largest orchestra he ever used in a piano concerto. It is clear that he planned this piece “big” from its conception, as it is the only one of his large-scale mature works in which he set down the score on manuscript paper pre-ruled to 16 staves, elsewhere preferring 12-staff paper. Mozart uses his forces to splendid effect, employing the winds both as soloists and as a choir to yield a fully symphonic texture. The mature Mozart always made telling use of wind instruments for highlighting textures and adding irresistible bits of contrapuntal commentary. Here, especially in the second movement, the entire wind section takes on an almost concertant role. 3 Notes on the Program By James M. Keller (continued) Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551, “Jupiter” (1788) Mozart produced his final three symphonies in the space of about nine weeks, in the summer of 1788. Twelve movements in nine weeks would mean that, on the average, he expended five days and a few hours on the composition of each movement. That doesn’t figure in the fact that he was writing other pieces at the same time, or that he was also giving piano lessons, tending a sick wife, enduring the death of a six-month-old daughter, entertaining friends, moving to a new apartment, and asking his fellow freemason Michael Puchberg for financial assistance. In his Symphony No. 41, Mozart seems intent on showing off his sheer brilliance as a composer. Its emotional range is wide indeed, prefiguring the vast expressive canvas that would emerge in the symphonies of Beethoven. In this work’s finale Mozart renders the listener slack-jawed through a breathtaking display of quintuple invertible counterpoint, and that in itself may be viewed as looking both backward, to the contrapuntal virtuosity we associate with Bach and Handel, and forward, to the dramatic power of fugue as demonstrated in many of the greatest compositions of Beethoven. Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 is universally known among English-speaking music lovers as the “Jupiter” Symphony. As with so many musical nicknames, this one did not originate with the composer. We have no reason to doubt the account provided by the English composer and publisher Vincent Novello, who (along with his wife) visited Mozart’s widow and their son Franz Xaver in 1829 and reported: “Mozart’s son said he considered the Finale to his father’s Sinfonia in C—which Salomon christened the ‘Jupiter’—to be the highest triumph of Instrumental Composition, and I agree with him.” This would have been the German violinist Johann Peter Salomon, remembered especially for having established himself as an impresario in London and arranged Franz Joseph Haydn’s two stints in Great Britain in the 1790s. It rings true: the earliest concert programs to use the nickname were Scottish and English, and the first printed edition to slap the name on the title page was a piano transcription of the symphony published in London in 1823.