Spring Symphonies No 71 - Mozart: Symphony No 39




Where does one start writing about Mozart?  What hasn’t already been said by musical minds?  How can I help you get into this music? My guiding principle is to describing it’s character as it appears to me, but this music is so clever and interesting that I feel I should do a bit more than that.

The symphonies which Mozart wrote late in his career - and people define that group quite arbitrarily - are all, pretty much, astonishing.  No 37 was declassified because it turned out to be by Michael Haydn.  No’s 33 and 34 don’t get played or recorded often enough and No 32 is an odd quasi-overture symphony only 8 or so minutes long but good value for all that.  They all retain that ability to delight - there’s a sense of wonder to be raised in listening to these works.  The engaging openings and their drive and sense of momentum.  The sweeping beautiful slow movements with pinpricks of heart warming or heart breaking immediacy are empathetic across the ages.  Witty minuets and lithesome trios abound.  The finales are thrilling and varied from wit and cosmopolitan charm to attractive melodies subverted into a gripping musical drama.  It is still amazing to listen to these works and pick out new details and subtle characteristics even after all my years of listening.  The works bear all manner of interpretations too and we thankfully have so many great Mozartians to enjoy: if you think you know a work you will be enchanted by a different reading by Fricsay, Kleiber or some other doyen of the past.

There’s been a tendency to talk about the last three symphonies of Mozart as miraculous event and as a culmination of a life’s work.  Alongside picture of the archetype of the great artist: struggling, in desperate financial straits, but able by some magic to pull perfectly formed rabbits out of hats.  For some this is due to some sort of divine destiny or devilish behaviour. Much of this is wishful thinking.  For a start - as Eric Blom pointed out - we don’t know when the last three symphonies were started - they might not have erupted as spontaneously as the romantics might have hoped.  These three were finished in a matter of weeks in 1788 and there is some debate about whether Mozart was planning a grand concert with all three in.  The late great conductor Nikolas Harnoncourt believed that they were even composed in a way to be heard in one concert - and when done like that make a very effective event.

We also know - as H C Robbins-Landon points out - that they were probably destined for specific orchestras, given their instrumentation.  They would have been hard for those orchestras to play, as he goes on to say, there would have been few clarinet and horn players in Europe, outside of Vienna, that could have played these parts so in some senses they are bespoke. As we get down to the practicalities of difficult stopped horn notes, optional clarinet parts following a revision (in No 40) and no oboes in No 39, we start to see the pragmatic approaches of a working composer.  We know also that he was desperate for money and bringing the best of his skill set to bear in these symphonies.  No 39 was the start of the final set - though I think we might presume that Mozart didn’t start them knowing that they were to be his last symphonies.  He died 3 years and a considerable body of works after these symphonies were written and first performed.

I’d argue that these works become even more fascinating when we see them in a true light and not as the produce of a superhuman.  Having said that we can’t get away from the music in his late symphonies - it has that element of sublime creation in it’s style and innovation and universality of utterance.  That does - like the very greatest music - leave us leaning towards some higher power - but it is just the genius of a highly trained mind. That said this symphony has lost it’s previous popularity if the Proms database is anything to go by - a yearly appearance at the festival in the early years of the last century it has declined to once or twice a decade since the 1990s.  A sad state of affairs for a great symphony.
 
The slow opening is not common in Mozart but a device commonly used by Mozart’s teacher Haydn.  Mozart’s opening is a mix of fanfare and scene setting and is more direct than Haydn’s gloomy and mysterious openings in his later symphonies.  The younger man’s introduction is a thing of delight and sophistication.  It has it’s own internal tensions which are part of the symphony’s background stories, and to keep them in our heads he leaves the opening unresolved and side steps into the Allegro and the first “theme”.  This first movement is classical but it doesn’t sound it - the themes are chunky ideas in a long, glowing and fluid line.  On first hearing it’s hard to detect which bits of it are significant  I’d say go with the flow - there are eddies and whirlpools but it maintains a mood of happy exploration.  The sonata structure is in there but much more subtle than say a Beethoven symphony, after more auditions the work fairly buzzes with internal cross references.  But it isn’t straightforward: in the 1966 edition of the Penguin“The Symphony” editor (and composer) Robert Simpson lets the great thinker and critic, Hans Keller take composer Gordon Jacob to task in the latter’s thematic analysis of this movement.  As Keller rightly says the second theme is not just stated by “emerges”.  Keller also suggests that the second subject’s material it is used so little later in the movement that it scarcely functions - we might just have another a long and fantastical stretch of music that is mutating all by itself.  He argues much the same for Mozart’s “Haffner” symphony No 35 where brevity is striking too but this is a very modern notion for many. By 1995 Michael Steinberg in his book “The Symphony” doesn’t go anywhere near a sonata form analysis of the movement.

The slow movement has a grace which is hard to pin down. There is something very genial about the main melody but also something quite disruptive about the about Mozart's choice of melody.  He hints at the heavenly throughout but never the ecstatic.  This music is never earth-bound but does contain a repeated bolder darker episode harking back to his Piano Concerto in D Minor (No 20) of 1785 and Don Giovanni (1787) and this symphony (1788) - but in this instance the effect is no as disruptive.  The whole movement has a marked understatement and I think this is part of the composer’s plan to have dazzling outer movements.

That inner simplicity is also readily heard in the Minuet and Trio.  They are very straight-forward little interplay as such.  In times past I would have got away with the term “rustic” - four square, orchestrated with a bias towards the clarinets chugging along in courtly style. The trio is delicate and in it's brief echoing string section echoes the slow movement.  It's all very simple - the kind of thing which moves use out of the court and onto the village green.  Beethoven surprises us similarly in his Sixth symphony.

The finale launches off with a jolly theme which contains many opportunities for Mozart's most playful rhetorical style.  It's a short explosion of voices, echoes, answers and joy.  I haven't done a survey but I would love to hear a repeat of the first half too - the repeat is marked in the score, if that were done it would be a substantial movement like those of it's older siblings.  A good recording will give you the inner voices including those delightful woodwind figures which make the movement build.  There's a challenge for the conductor too - this movement can be robust like an early Beethoven or late Haydn symphony - or roomy and airy like it's young sister. But they must choose one without risking clarity in the many lines of the climaxes or risking movement in the interplay.  It's a great closing episode.  Busy strings and chanting winds, cross and interweave at first with delicate distance - impeccable choreography.  The movement doesn't speed up but it creates and illusion of speed as the quasi development tosses the phrases and fragments with abandon. Retrograde motions collide in a contrapuntal wonderland, there's a delicious recapitulation gliding into in a fulsome coda.  The music is pervaded by a questioning figure and it’s reply which ends the work, Tidy. Done with.

To add to the joy Bernstein repeats the second half of the movement in his joyful recording in the 1980s.  I haven’t done a survey of who does that, nor who repeats the first half of the movement either but surely this material deserves it.  Harnoncourt does all the repeats and you can hear his concert presentation of all three last symphonies here in a enduring record here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pShalO-Ajgc


Steinberg calls it witty - I think like the best witty literature some of the jokes are buried deeper and require frequent rehearings.  My delight in this work grows each time I hear it.  We never tire of teh great masterpieces. 

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