Sunday morning: Mozart & Haydn

Easy Sunday mornings are meant for music. Sit back, relax and enjoy Mozart's moving, inspiring Sinfonia Concertante.

What are you going to listen to?

Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 's career in Salzburg, in the service of the archbishop, was marked by tensions back and forth. In the Austrian provincial city, he was given few freedoms to develop, and after yet another clash, Mozart was fired. In 1777, hoping for a better appointment, he left with his mother on a trip to Mannheim and Paris, two prominent cities in European musical life.  

For several decades, the orchestra in Mannheim was considered among the best orchestras in the world, with its own style of playing and all kinds of orchestral innovations such as the many dynamic shades between hard and soft, driving crescendos with trills in the orchestral parts, or swift figures upward like the "Mannheim rocket. Mozart absorbed all these original ideas, but a permanent appointment in Mannheim or Paris was out of the question. 

Very popular in Paris was the so-called "sinfonia concertante," a work for two or more solo instruments and orchestra. Mozart also wrote similar compositions here for the combinations flute-harp or violin-viola-cello, and on his return to Salzburg he began his Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. Both solo instruments are equal and enter into dialogue with each other like opera characters. The viola soloist had Mozart tune all the strings a semitone higher for a different kind of sound, but this is rarely done today. 

The work full of Mannheim rhetoric stands out for its unusual orchestration. With two viola parts in the orchestra, the music has a rich color palette in the middle register. Different themes and rhythmic motifs are always connected in the Sinfonia concertante. This was probably the advice Mozart received in a letter from his father. "Good composition, sound construction, il filo - that distinguishes the master from the tinkerer." The thread connecting all musical elements ("il filo") is the key word and we also observe it in Haydn's late symphonies. 

Haydn

Shortly after the Sinfonia concertante, Mozart broke with his employer in Salzburg for good and settled in Vienna, where he met Joseph Haydn. As a viola player, Mozart played string quartet with his musical role model. For Haydn, periods in Vienna were welcome times for inspiration, for much of the year he was at the country home of his breadlord, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in remote Eisenstadt. 

After his death in 1790, Haydn left for Vienna with a good pension to consider his future. Thanks to contacts with the impresario Johann Peter Salomon, he embarked on the adventure of performing his music in London as well. It became a resounding success. Having performed six symphonies (Nos. 93-98) during his visit in 1791, Haydn traveled again to the British capital three years later. 

Haydn thoroughly researched the musical tastes of the London public, studying their literature, reading reviews and listening to their favorite artists. On this basis, he carefully shaped his six new London symphonies according to British preferences. In cultural high society, Haydn was embraced as the "Shakespeare of music. 

For example, he discovered that major resonated better than minor, and musical jokes such as an unexpected timpani strike or an imitation of a bell also did well in London. Haydn's Symphony No. 104 has been called the highlight of the London series. How the simple opening theme is used optimally to build all the other musical material from it later became a model of classical compositional technique in its utmost perfection. 

In the finale, he incorporated a popular tune over a bagpipe-like bourdon tone. Possibly the Londoners recognized in it the sales cries sung in the marketplace, but more likely Haydn used a Croatian folk song popular in the Eisenstadt area. Perhaps Haydn deliberately kept it in the middle. 

Frans Boendermaker