Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 1 in E flat major, K16 (1864)
Allegro molto
Andante
Presto
The thought that Mozart actually composed a Symphony No 1, employing (at the age of eight) a theme which would reappear in the Jupiter symphony, requires what can only be called suspension of disbelief. Did his influential father have a hand in it? Was it written by Mozart at all? Was he, wunderkind though he was, even capable of writing it? His second and third symphonies, as we now know, were the work of other people, but all the evidence points to the authenticity of K16. True, the music itself does not tell us as much. How could it be expected to do so? Even the reiterating and quite recognisable anticipation of the Jupiter symphony, which dominates the slow movement, is just an eighteenth-century tag, consisting of the notes do-re-fa-mi in sol-fa notation. Mozart employed it more than once in the course of his career, before bringing it to its apotheosis in the finale of his last symphony. Yet the way the horns play it, or underline it, in this boyhood work seems nothing if not significant, even though, in suggesting as much, we are merely being wise after the event.
Or are we? Mozart himself was presumably thinking along ambitious lines when, in writing the piece, he asked his sister Nannerl to remind him to give the horns "something special to do." Moreover the circumstances in which he composed it, during the famous family visit to London when he met Johann Christian Bach and performed for King George III, were curiously, indeed mysteriously, Mozartian, with his father lying in bed, seemingly dying of pneumonia but in fact suffering from no more than a cold, and with the children under orders not to make the slightest noise. Instead, said Nannerl of her brother, "he composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra – but especially for trumpets and kettledrums."
Though the absence of trumpets and drums from the score may suggest that it was a different symphony she was copying for him as she sat beside him in Leopold Mozart's sickroom, the parts for these instruments (not for the only time in a work by Mozart) may simply have been lost. Certainly the fanfares of the first movement sound ceremonial enough to imply their presence, even if it would be going too far to suggest, as one authority has done, that the stuttering rhythm is an anticipation of Papageno in The Magic Flute. The slow movement in C minor, however, is surely an early manifestation of sombre Mozartian poignancy, swept aside by the breezy concluding presto.
© Conrad Wilson
