1756-1791

There is some controversy among scholars whether Mozart himself actually gave the first performance of his five known violin concertos, but there is no question that he was already a master violinist in his childhood. In fact, his father, Leopold – ever the “backstage parent” – was frequently after him to show off his skills by writing a virtuoso concerto for the instrument: “You yourself do not know how well you play the violin,” he wrote to his son. When Mozart finally did write concertos for the instrument in 1773-75, he wrote a bunch of them, his five concertos only 12 Koechel numbers apart. At that time, Mozart was in Salzburg, in the employment of Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo for whom he both composed and served as violinist in the court orchestra. Mozart hated his employer who was a strict taskmaster and had no truck with his young musician, however talented. Although Mozart was more than seven years in the Archbishop’s employ, he spent nearly three of them on furlough – stretched to AWOL – performing around Europe and, none too diplomatically, looking for another job. By 1774, he was apparently quite negligent about his violin playing and possibly wrote the concertos for his friend, the court violinist Antonio Brunetti, whose abilities were limited and who had difficulty playing them. After 1775, Mozart occasionally performed them himself.

Mozart’s violin concertos are relatively modest works by a youthful master, written at a time when the genre had become neglected. After the flourishing of the Baroque violin concerto by such masters as Vivaldi and Tartini, it went into partial hibernation until Beethoven awakened it with a new kind of virtuosic writing that was to set the stage for the great romantic concertos of Mendelssohn, Bruch and Tchaikovsky. Mozart left no cadenzas but most players either write their own or borrow one from the pen of any number of great violinists.

The A-major concerto has a number of unusual features, including a long “recitative” leading into the second movement, almost a melancholy aria for the violin. The Concerto is also known as the “Turkish” concerto because Mozart included a diversion in the final rondo of faux Turkish sounding music similar to, but more gentle than the finale of the much later Piano Sonata, K. 331 and the overture to the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. Although bearing little resemblance to authentic Turkish music, this passage is supposed to reflect the jangling, percussive music of the Janissary soldiers of the Ottoman Turks. Many composers of the period were captivated by this exotic orientalism, especially composers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose eastern borders were continually threatened by their Ottoman neighbors. Among the most famous examples is the second movement of Franz Josef Haydn’s Symphony No. 100, the “Military.”

Often compared unfavorably to his contemporary, Mozart, Haydn had one of the most innovative and creative musical minds of his time. It is to Haydn that we owe the development of the string quartet into a mature and enduring form. And we can also credit him with expanding the emotional range and harmonic vocabulary of the classical symphony.

During the mid 1760s through the 70s, Haydn’s music underwent a profound transformation. His symphonies ceased to be mere light entertainment, becoming increasingly intense and dramatic. This change coincided with the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) literary movement in Germany. Compose Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach is the best-known master of this style.

Haydn composed Symphony No. 64 in 1773-74. Its nickname, which heads a copy of the full score and all the orchestral parts(!) from the Esterhazy estate, where Haydn was composer-in-residence, comes from a 1615 collection of epigrams by John Owen:

The reason for the prominence of the epigram is not clear, but theater journals of the 1770s listed Haydn as music director to theatrical troupes in residence at Eszterháza; one theory suggests that his symphonies may have been performed as entr’actes accompanying dramatic performances. The Austrian Court particularly favored tragedies, including translations of Shakespeare.

There is nothing about the music that suggests the grim trajectories of a Shakespearean tragedy; Haydn was a master of pulling out all the emotive stops when he wanted to. Nonetheless, both the first and second movements offer sharply contrasted musical weather patterns. The first movement opens with a sunny melody followed by a stormy outburst. The development section is uncharacteristically long and builds on the dark and light symbolism in the music. And there is no recapitulation.

The second movement, Andante, which begins with another rather generic melody, is peppered with odd fermatas after most of the phrases and increasingly peppered with dark interjections. It concludes on an ominous note – as befits a stage tragedy – also instead of the normal repeat of the first section.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com