Sinfonie Nr. 36 KV 425 (Linzer)
Sinfonie Nr. 41 KV 551 (Jupiter)
Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg
Ivor Bolton, Dirigent
Mozart‘s late symphonic master works KV 425 Linz
Symphony and KV 551 Jupiter Symphony, performed by
the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra under the direction
of Ivor Bolton, are now available on one single
CD.
“The sparkling, tonally outstanding recordings
document that the Mozarteum Orchestra is one of
the most competent Mozart performers of our time”,
Schallplattenmann wrote on the first release. And
Pizzicato proclaimed:
“… thoroughly very lively, very
well formed, very transparent and vital Mozart symphonies“.
Instrumental masterworks
In a letter dated October 31, 1783, addressed
to his father Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang
writes: On Tuesday, November 4th, I will
give [a concert] in the theater here. – and because I
don’t have a single symphony with me, I’m working
head over heels on a new one, which must be finished
by then. Konstanze and Wolfgang Amadé
had left Salzburg on the 27th of that month;
Wolfgang was never again to return. Johann
Joseph Anton Graf Thun invited the two travelers
to stay with him; it is Thun whom we must
thank for the Linz Symphony, K. 425. Despite
the speed at which it was written, the work is
perfectly balanced, painstakingly detailed and
as rich in ideas as could be. It was played many
times during the composer’s life: in Vienna,
Salzburg and possibly even Prague.
For the first time, Mozart followed the example
of his friend Joseph Haydn, immediately
trumping the latter, however, with the first electrifying,
rhythmically dotted and accented 19
measures of his work. Minor shadings, however,
cloud the festive brilliance. Even the idyllic 6/8
F-Major Adagio, which also uses trumpets and
tympani, is not entirely spared these shadows.
The mood swings in the Finale, which succeeds
the more rustic than courtly Menuetto, also convey
a certain melancholy.
In this work, Mozart counters the characterizations
of C Major expressed by many earlier or
contemporaneous composers and theoreticians
(Marc-Antoine Charpentier: joyous and warlike;
Johann Mattheson: rough and coarse, but
not unfitting to express happiness and joy; Mozart
contemporary Daniel Schubart: innocent, naïve,
childlike). This is especially true for his last work
in this genre, noted on August 10, 1788 in 93rd
position in his own handwritten Verzeichnüß
aller meiner Werke (index of his works) and later
entitled the Jupiter Symphony, K. 551 by London
concertmaster Johann Peter Salomon. (Until
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica, op. 55, Mozart’s
Jupiter Symphony was the greatest work of the Viennese
Classic – not only because of its length.)
It is important to “listen between the lines”:
this music, full of ambivalence and never completely
expressing true jubilation, is based on
the dualism of male and female, hard and soft.
This is clearly perceptible at the beginning of
the first movement (lightened up, however, by
a third theme quoting the buffo-aria Un bacio
di mano, KV 541) and in reverse order in the
Andante and Menuetto.
Mozart had already written a slow introduction
for Johann Michael Haydn’s G Major
Symphony P. I, no. 16 (K. 444=425a) in Linz;
now he began using
Haydn’s idea of combining
sonata-form with fugal elements to create a
crowning contrapuntal masterpiece for the final
movement. He even literally incorporated several
measures from Haydn’s C Major Symphony, P.
30, dated February 19, 1788, presumably unconsciously.
According to Alfred Einstein, Mozart’s
underlying plan, the four-tone motive, occupied
him many times during his life: from the slow
movement of his first Symphony in E-flat Major,
K. 16, to the Credo in the F Major Mass, K. 186f
(192), the Sanctus of the Credo Mass, K. 257 and
the development of the B-flat Major Symphony,
K. 319.
Horst Reischenböck
Translation: Elizabeth Gahbler