In the summer of 1788, Mozart completed work on three symphonies. He finished Number 39 in Eb Major on June 26, Number 40 in g minor on July 25, and Number 41 in C Major on August 10.
There is no unambiguous proof that the composer ever heard a performance of any of these works. There are surviving concert programs that refer to performances of Mozart symphonies later than summer 1788 and earlier than December 1791, when the composer died, but it’s not clear which works are being referred to.
Wikipedia tells us that in 2011, a letter written in 1802 was discovered containing a recollection of the performance of the g minor symphony that Mozart attended at a private home. The letter reports that the composer was so upset by the poor quality of the performance that he left the room.
The letter was written some twelve years after the event. How accurately can you recall the details of a concert you went to over a decade ago? Whether or not the 1802 letter is an accurate recollection, the best evidence that Mozart heard Symphony No. 40 at least once is the fact that he revised the score. The woodwinds in the original score were a flute, two oboes, two bassoons, and two French horns. The revised version doesn’t alter melodies or harmonies, but it adds two clarinets and adjusts the oboe parts accordingly. (Neither version has trumpets or drums.) The inference is that he revised the orchestration after he heard the piece. The conclusion is not ironclad; someone working at this level would have heard the music well enough in his mind without the aid of sound waves hitting his eardrums. After all, he composed the original version without hearing it performed by an orchestra.
Mozart did not compose another symphony before his death in December 1791. The three that he produced in the summer of 1788 were his last. Their standing as his final symphonies, the brief time the composer needed to produce works of transcendent quality, and doubts about performance during his lifetime have combined to open the door to the romantic notion that these symphonies were addressed to posterity and not to flesh-and-blood audiences of the 1780s. The musicologist and Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein said they were an “appeal to eternity”.
These romantic notions ignore some mundane facts. Mozart had a family to support. He was a man who enjoyed good company. He led an active social life, where he indulged a taste for practical jokes and adolescent-level bathroom humor. He was beset by problems in 1788 – his wife was ill, a child had died in infancy, he was short of money. Because he did not have a wealthy patron, if he wanted an income, he had to continue to compose and perform music that listeners would pay to hear. It’s unlikely that he took nine weeks off to write three symphonies for audiences yet unborn, like a message in a bottle floated out to sea.
Mozart didn’t write a lot of music in minor keys. Within that limited sphere, the first movement of K. 550 stands out for its chameleon-like quality. It changes character, becoming at times more intense, at others less, in its minor key qualities.
Other Mozart minor key works that I am familiar with display one of two characters. Some are “lightly minor” while others fully embrace the dark character of the minor key in which they were composed. The c minor Serenade K. 388 (composed for wind octet, then repurposed as the String Quintet K. 406), the g minor Piano Quartet K. 478, and the d minor String Quartet K. 421 (one of the “Haydn” quartets) fall into the first category. Their minor key sonority is mild and they retain a sweet quality not often associated with minor keys. The g minor String Quintet K. 516 splits the difference. Its first movement is properly minor while its last movement is downright cheerful once it gets going.
In contrast, the two minor key Piano Concertos, No. 20 in d minor K. 466 and No. 24 in c minor K. 491, are unremittingly dark in their outer movements. These are unsettled, agitated, sometimes menacing, sometimes fierce.
Symphony 40 is harder to pin down. Each statement of the opening movement’s first theme has a level of light or shade slightly different from its neighbors. Leonard Bernstein provides a brilliant explanation to show that Mozart pulls off this effect by combining chromaticism in the upper voices – the use of notes that are a half-step higher or lower than the tones natural to the home key – with a relatively conventional downward progression of fifths in the lower voices. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ZE38BQmvQ.
Another oddity in that first movement is the way the upper strings step all over the lines of the other sections. The movement begins with the lower strings playing a rhythmic accompaniment. If we’re going to have an introduction, the audience expects to hear it before the main event gets going. A one and a two and a three . . . . Instead, the upper strings come in after the “and a one”. What if the listener isn’t ready? The composer asks you to catch up.
The strings do it again 20 measures later. At measure 14, the winds join the strings to close out the initial statement of the opening theme. With that done, at measure 20 the winds provide a conventional bridge of descending thirds to pave the way for the strings to state the theme a second time. The strings impatiently step on those thirds and begin the theme again without waiting for the winds to finish.
To complete the trifecta, the strings do the same thing at the end of the development section. The composer has used the development to dissect the first subject down to its component notes until the winds prepare at measure 164 to take the listener by the hand for a gentle reintroduction of the first subject in full. The violins again barge back in. On this restatement of the first subject, the violins don’t wait for even one measure of accompaniment by the lower strings. The violas, cellos, and bass come in later.
There is one more twist to mention in the first movement. In the standard treatment of a sonata-allegro movement, the first and second subjects are presented initially in different keys. The tension that results – felt if not heard consciously – is released when the two subjects return after the development section. The first subject will be altered – modulated – in some way so that the second subject can be restated in the home key. As I’ve said before, no one needs to know any of this to enjoy a piece of music, any more than you need to know about gothic arches, pilasters, or groined vaults to be moved by great architecture. But it helps a listener who is trying to understand how a composer uses technical means to produce an overwhelming emotional impact.
In K. 550, the first movement’s initial theme is in g minor, while the second subject, which arrives at measure 44 as a huge sigh from the orchestra, is in Bb major, a minor third higher. After the development, as the first subject squares up to give way to the second subject, the composer plunges the music deep into the lower strings. After a roundabout trip the music moves back up to the violins. The composer is ready to reintroduce the second subject in its new key, which should be G major. However, Mozart modifies the second subject to present it in g minor. A YouTube commenter said that this little trick – stating the second subject in a major key on its first appearance and transferring it to a minor key on its return – is something Mozart did in all of his minor key sonata movements. The mood of the movement is now permanently darkened and stays that way to the final g minor chord.
The second movement is the only extended sunny moment in the symphony. Its themes are simple – the piling up of a chord to open the movement, a little two-note bird call further on, and so on in that vein. The composer presents these pleasant melodies initially in a pastoral mood, but uses these same innocent elements to produce a stormy interlude and a brief minor key climax before returning the listener to the tranquil mood that began the movement.
The third movement, a minuet and trio in A-B-A form, is in an unambiguously minor mode in the outer sections. Tension in the minuet is provided through a disagreement among the upper and lower strings over meter. The rhythmic instability is unsettling. It isn’t clear from measure to measure which section is in charge. The trio is the last of the symphony’s bright spots. The instrumental sections take turns repeating a pleasant dance theme. Even the violins behave until the minuet returns.
The fourth movement, in sonata form, is remarkable for its ability to project barely controlled chaos once the movement’s main themes have been presented – a nervous, agitated first subject and a more lyrical but equally nervous second subject. In the YouTube video I mentioned earlier, Leonard Bernstein points out that in one disorienting passage in this movement, the composer uses 11 different tones – every note in the chromatic scale except for G, the tonic on which the movement is grounded. He notes that this is a technique that a listener would expect to encounter in the 20th century but not in the 18th. As in the first movement, the second subject is converted from Bb major to g minor on its return after the development. The mood darkens until repeated minor scales in the bass and broken arpeggios in the violins close the movement, which ends on a defiant g minor chord.
This is a perfect piece of music and deserves a perfect recording. I haven’t found the perfect recording but I can recommend a few that I will live with until a perfect one comes along.
Part of the difficulty in the pursuit of perfection in this piece lies in finding a tempo that allows the cleanest possible articulation of each note while maintaining a sense of forward motion. Tempos have gotten faster over the decades. Compare this 1956 recording of a performance conducted by Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcALATiVlZs&t=363s with a 1992 recording conducted by John Elliot Gardiner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1n9cVbwaz4. The Gardiner performance gives the impression that the rental for the recording studio was about to expire so that the only way to avoid surcharges was to hurry to allow time to pack up the instruments.
In addition to moderately brisk tempos in service to clear articulation, I prefer performances that take the indicated repeats and that demonstrate Mozart’s ability to get the upper strings to shimmer and shine. Two contemporary recordings that get things about right for me are Julien Salemkour conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqkXqpQMk2k&t=448s and Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQ-POuTNn8&t=808s. Incidentally, the Frankfurt performance appears to be the original version of the symphony, without clarinets. An older (1977), somewhat slower, but satisfying performance (with clarinets) is provided by Karl Böhm (1894-1981) and the Vienna Philharmonic.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that each of these orchestras is German or Austrian and that each has been in existence for a long time. Frankfurt began in 1929, the Vienna Philharmonic in 1842, and the Berlin Staatskapelle before 1570(!). An orchestra will feel a piece like this in its bones as generations of young musicians learn the subtleties of the music from their elders and then pass that knowledge to those who come after them. For example, in this 20-minute clip from a master class, the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic works through K. 550 with a young violinist in part to prepare her for an audition in the first violins but also to teach her the way that she will perform the piece if her audition gets her a seat in the orchestra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwC-2GBnMWY&t=234s.
This is a widely loved work and for that reason there are many recordings, including some eccentrics that I have encountered. Nikolaus Harnoncourt built a distinguished career as part of the historical performance movement. The idea was to produce the music of earlier centuries using instruments from the period, or replicas of those instruments, along with historically accurate tempos, tunings, and performance styles. However, in this recording of the 40th Symphony he leads the Concertgebouw, an orchestra in the modern, conventional mold. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6LJBzXTyPk&list=PLZbukSlHOkYQuiopQ2sPn9uWZsP2ATJ9n&index=8
His tempos are erratic and changeable. Long pauses are inserted into sectional breaks within movements. I found the performance less than enjoyable. This talented orchestra might have been used to better purpose.
This performance by the Basel Chamber Orchestra would be among my favorites but for one flaw that is as annoying as a toothache. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDzxKJkU21s&t=127s At measures 90 through 94 (starting at 1:45 on the recording), we are getting ready to close out the exposition of the first movement. A series of four quarter notes starts the process. It is interrupted and then continued by a similar series of eight quarter notes. All of these notes should receive equal stress as they take us along the path to the final measures of the exposition (and later to the final measures of the movement). They should sound: bum bum bum bum bum bum. For reasons of his own, the conductor, Umberto Benedetti Michelangeli, the nephew of the great pianist with the same last name, decides to throw a little ragtime into this passage, so we get: BARRUMPH BUM bum bum bum bum.
I can’t listen to it without getting annoyed, which is a shame because it is otherwise a fine performance. Other compensations include a highly engaged and entertaining concertmaster and the fact that the orchestra presents the original oboe version.
As an alternative, a chamber orchestra presentation without clarinets that avoids the ragtime (and also dispenses with a conductor) is provided by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLAh_0Nd6j0
One final eccentric recording: The Harvard lecture by Leonard Bernstein that I mentioned earlier is followed by a performance of the symphony by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Bernstein conducting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8bZ7vm4_6M The orchestra members are all dressed in somber tones. The men wear black ties, the (very few) women wear black evening gowns. The musicians sit on white raised platforms. The scene is lit brightly but starkly. They display minimal emotion or movement as they perform. In contrast, Bernstein is presented with a dark backdrop, dramatically lit. He sways, he grimaces, he is transported as he waves his baton. I’m sure the maestro was deeply moved by this music. How could he not be? What seems comical to me is how much he wants us to know he is moved. After watching this video, I had the mischievous thought that perhaps Bernstein was not really conducting the orchestra on this occasion. Is it possible that the BSO performed under the direction of a stand-in, musical stunt double, and that the producer dubbed in the gesticulating maestro later? The video is inconclusive.
Anyone interested in further commentary on performances of this symphony can consult two excellent resources. Gramophone magazine offers a deep dive into recordings of K. 550. Mozart’s Symphony No 40: A deep dive into the best recordings | Gramophone
Gramophone’s favorite recording is a performance by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Charles Mackerras. I agree that this is a fine performance. Mackerras takes every repeat (even one in the third movement that strictly speaking is not indicated), which is a joy to those of us who like performances that respect the composer’s intentions on repeats. Tempos are well-judged and the sound is first-rate.
Dave Hurwitz offers a review of the six final Mozart symphonies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkA16kBTkrk&t=1378s His favorite is Sandor Vegh conducting the Salzburg Camerata Academia, which I would not place in the first rank, but he covers a number of others as well.
Otto Klemperer, one of the conductors I mentioned earlier, was asked in an interview to name his favorite composers. He went through a list of the expected names – Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms – but didn’t mention Mozart. When the interviewer asked him why he left out Mozart, Klemperer said “I thought you were asking about the others.” The story is probably an invention.
–Gerry Bresslour
The Passing Scene 