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Listen to Mozart |
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Listen to a contemporary recording of Mozart's penultimate symphony, played by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conducted by Grant Llewellyn.
This is the second of Mozart's final trilogy of symphonies, written in Vienna, within less than two months, in the summer of 1788.
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The reason for this spate of symphonic composition is unknown; it was a painful time for Mozart - his fourth child, a daughter called Theresia, died on 29 June at the age of six months; Mozart was in painful financial straits and had been forced to move into a smaller apartment in a suburb of Vienna.
During this period, Mozart began turning for money to a friend and fellow-Freemason, Michael Puchberg. To Puchberg's credit, he seems to have responded to all of Mozart's frequent requests for money. Mozart's financial predicament was certainly due to the difficulty of securing lucrative permanent employment and musical commissions, although he had a tendency to spend perhaps recklessly when money was coming in. In early 1788 Mozart had been appointed chamber musician to the Emperor, at a salary of 800 gulden, but otherwise it had been a lean year. In one of his letters to Puchberg, Mozart reveals that his productivity in writing the first of his last three symphonies has risen appreciably since his move to smaller quarters - in ten days he has written as much as he completed in two months in his former home.
If you are looking to find a reflection of the stresses in Mozart's life, the Symphony No 40 may appear to provide it. Mozart's biographer Alfred Einstein called it a 'fatalistic piece of chamber music'. Writing about the frequent changes of key in the symphony, he said, 'These developments are plunges into the abyss of the soul, symbolised in modulations so bold that to Mozart's contemporaries they must have seemed to lose their way entirely, and so distant that only Mozart himself could find the way back from time to time.'
The Symphony certainly has an emotional intensity that marks it out as one of the greatest tragic works of the Viennese Classical period. Unusually, it begins with a driving rhythm which sets up the arrival of the famous opening theme - this is music which in the 1970s found its way out of the classical concert hall and into the popular music charts; in our own time, for thousands of people, it heralds the arrival of a mobile phone call. Driving rhythms are also central to the Symphony's finale, and the Minuet, which comes third, is unusually serious in mood - here, the rhythmic energy is concentrated in defiant syncopations of the main tune: the graceful mood normally associated with a Minuet only surfaces in the Trio section.
The Finale, like the first movement, is constructed using sonata form - a musical theme is articulated, then developed, then revisited. In this particular finale, the development section features a rather violent rhythmic and melodic distortion of the main theme; for a moment, it seems that the music has suddenly lost its sense of direction - it's a musical gesture which seems to plunge the music far into the future.
Programme note by Graeme Kay © BBC
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