Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756, the son of a court musician, Leopold Mozart, whose important book on the study of the violin was published in the same year. Young Mozart spent his precocious childhood in a series of concert tours that took him to the cities of Austria and Germany, to Paris and to London, greeted wherever he stayed with curiosity and wonder. The boy had remarkable ability as a keyboard-player, as a violinist and as a composer, and all these gifts were displayed, in conjunction with the less remarkable talents of his elder sister, Anna Maria, known in the family as Nannerl.
It was in the 1770s, in particular, that Mozart began to feel impatient with his surroundings. He left Salzburg, after the new Archbishop proved an unsympathetic employer. Mozart and his mother left for Paris, where he had been successful as a child. On their way they spent some months in Mannheim, working with the famous orchestra in the city. Once in Paris, Mozart was treated with disdain by the French nobility and the visit turned into a disappointment. In 1778 his mother died and a few months later Mozart returned to Salzburg, only to leave three years later for Vienna.
The last ten years of Mozart’s life were spent in initially successful but precarious independence in Vienna. Here he was able to realise more fully his greatest ambition, as a composer of opera, a skill that he had hitherto exercised only in occasional commissions outside Salzburg. He excelled as a keyboard-player and pleased his audiences, until the novelty of his playing began to wear thin, while attracting amateur and professional pupils. An imprudent marriage in 1782 increased the expenses of living, in spite of his own optimistic forecasts, and his final years were rendered uneasy through the uncertainty of his income, coupled with the expectations that he and his father had
long entertained.
Symphony in C, K551, bears the date 10 August 1788, and is the last of the final group of three symphonies that Mozart wrote down in the space of a few weeks during the summer of 1788. It was possibly intended to form part of the programme for a series of public concerts that Mozart had envisaged but that were never to take place.
The first movement opens with an immediate and striking call to our attention, followed by a gentler addition from the strings, elements of great importance in what is to come. The strings introduce a second theme and a third, towards the close of the exposition.
It is this last that opens the central development section of the movement, contrapuntal activity leading to the premature reappearance of the opening figure and ultimately to the recapitulation proper.
The slow movement makes use of a richness of harmony that sets off the characteristic pathos of the melodic material. It is followed by a Minuet and Trio that lead to the final movement, the contrapuntal features of which persuaded later commentators to describe the work as “the symphony with a closing fugue”. Some element of counterpoint is not altogether unusual in the last movement of a symphony, but Mozart here provides an inspired example of the technique, with a remarkable series of canonic imitations in the coda, as the instruments imitate in turn a series of thematic fragments from earlier in the movement.
© Elizabeth Boulton
