Accademia Ziliniana, Eduard Fischer - Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik / 3 Salzburg Symphonies (1995)

As a child Mozart had enjoyed phenomenal success, travelling through Europe and, with his sister Nannerl, performing for kings and queens, the nobility and others able to afford the spectacle. His father Leopold Mozart, Vice-Kapellmeister to the Archbishop of Salzburg, had taken good care of his only surviving son’s education and musical training, and had managed his career at the expense of his own.
In December 1771 the Mozart’s patron, the Archbishop, had died and was succeeded early in the following year by a less sympathetic churchman, the reformist Count Hieronymus von Colloredo, a son of the Imperial Vice-Chancellor. The new Archbishop shared the feelings of the Imperial family on the activities of the Mozarts, who seemed to bring no credit on their employers by “travelling around like beggars”. The concert tours that had brought some profit and distinction to the family were to be curtailed, and Mozart was for a few years to be more or less confined to the narrow limits of Salzburg, in a position that he and his father found quite unworthy of his genius.
Nevertheless in Salzburg there was work to be done, music to be written and played. In 1777 Mozart was to set out, accompanied only by his mother, to seek his fortune in Mannheim and in Paris, an abortive journey, during the course of which his mother died. Mannheim in particular, with its virtuoso orchestra, provided a stimulus to his work. Before this, however, Salzburg had provided the occasion for a number of compositions, including the three Divertimenti, K. 136, K. 137 and K. 138, presumably intended for use during the composer’s final visit to Italy in 1772.
Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Serenade in G, K. 525, comes from a later period of Mozart’s life. In 1781 Mozart, who had returned from Mannheim and Paris to the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg, accompanied his patron on a visit to the Imperial capital, Vienna. There he finally broke with his employer and secured his dismissal from the archiepiscopal court. In Vienna there was every opportunity, which it seemed his patron was deliberately preventing him from seizing.
The last ten years of Mozart’s life were spent in Vienna, without the presence of his father to guide him and without the kind of secure patronage that he hoped to gain at court. An imprudent marriage brought its own difficulties, but Mozart, nevertheless, won some immediate acclaim, both in the theatre and as a performer on the fortepiano, popularity which waned, but had begun to revive at the time of his sudden death in December, 1791.
Eine kleine Nachtmusik was written in August, 1787, a few months after the death of Leopold Mozart in Salzburg, while Mozart was preparing his new opera, Don Giovanni, for performance in Prague. The occasion of the composition is unknown, but the work would have been suitable for domestic performance. Originally including a first Minuet, now lost, the Serenade opens with music as lucid and cheerful as anything Mozart wrote, followed by a Romance of charm and ingenuity, a spry Minuet and a final Rondo, a conclusion to the remarkable series of Serenades and Divertimenti on which Mozart had embarked twenty years before, as a ten-year-old.
The three so-called Divertimenti, K. 136, K. 137 and K. 138, sometimes known with rather more accuracy as the Salzburg Symphonies, have about them more of the latter than the former. A Divertimento was generally in a series of five movements, and these three-movement works conform to the model of the Italian form of symphony. Since they were written in Salzburg early in 1772, they may well have been intended to serve a symphonic purpose during the coming journey to Italy, when wind parts could have been added, as required. They precede, in any case, a series of string quartets written in Italy later in the same year, and may themselves be played as quartets, although once again their three movements suggest another aim.
The first of the set, in D major, is a model of classical clarity, its first movement, in the usual tripartite sonata form, followed by a moving Andante. The final movement finds a place for counterpoint in its central development, adding further dimension to music of concertante brilliance. The second work, K. 137, in В flat major, opens with a gentler movement, in the expected form, and this is followed by a rapid Allegro di molto and a final Allegro assai of extreme clarity. The last of the group, K. 138, in F major, with a classical first movement and a C major slow movement in similar form, closes with brilliant rondo of transparent texture, an example of a perfection of art in which technical mastery is masked by simplicity of genius.