Mozart: Serenade No. 10, 'gran Partita'

Description

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756.1791) Serenade in B Flat, K. 361 (Gran Partita)LargoAllegro moltoMenuetto - Trio I & IIAdagioMenuetto: Allegretto - Trio I & IIRomance: AdagioTheme with variationsRondo. Allegro moltoThe early career ofMozart as an infant prodigy had taken him to the leading cities of Europe andaccustomed him to the admiration of the great, the famous and those who weresimply curious. Leopold Mozart, who was to become and to remainVice-Kapellmeister to the Archbishop of Salzburg, sacrificed his own career andambitions to the genius of his son, teaching him and then arranging his careerfor him, hoping always for some material recognition for what seemed to him amiraculous gift of God.In the eventmaterial ambitions remained largely unrealised. In adolescence Mozart foundhimself tied to the Salzburg court, and his excursion to Paris in 1777 and1778, unaccompanied by his father, provided nothing to his advantage, whilebringing him into contact with the Weber family, a connection that was to provedistinctly disadvantageous when he was, in 1782, inveigled into marriage withKonstanze Weber, after being jilted by her elder sister.It was in 1781 thatMozart broke his ties with Salzburg and, to some extent, with his father. Duringthe course of a visit to Vienna, as a member of the household of the Archbishopof Salzburg, Count Hieronymus von Colloredo, he quarrelled with his patron andsecured his immediate dismissal. There was now no question of returning toSalzburg and to his father. Lured, perhaps, by the initial enthusiasm of themusical public in Vienna, he stayed there, winning early success in theopera-house and with a series of piano concertos. His fortunes were to take aturn for the worse towards the end of the decade, but seemed to recover withthe popular success of The Magic Flute, which was running at the time of hissudden death in 1791.The Serenade in BFlat, K. 361, known sometimes as the Gran Partita from a later, misspeltaddition to the title-page of the autograph, seems to have been written in 1783and 1784, rather than in 1781, as Alfred Einstein supposed. The first referenceto the Serenade occurs in accounts of a concert given by the clarinettist AntonStadler on 23rd March 1784. Johann Friedrich Schink, who was present, hasunreserved praise for the playing of Stadler and for Mozart's composition,listing the thirteen instruments involved, but mentioning only four movements.There is no doubt that Schink is referring to the B flat Serenade, and we may presumethat only four of the movements were played at Stadler's concert.The Serenade isscored for two oboes, two clarinets, two basset-horns, four horns, two bassoonsand double-bass and is in eight movements. The first of these opens with animposing introduction, leading to an Allegro, with constant variations in thegrouping instruments, among which the clarinets are usually prominent.The first Minuethas a first Trio scored for clarinets and basset-horns, and a second using thewhole ens