Special Valentine’s Concert: Mozart Loves Haydn
Featuring the BCO Wind Octet
Steven Lipsitt, Music Director, conducting
Wednesday , Feb 14, 2007 at 8 pm
The Eighteenth-Century Wind Octet
In middle-eighteenth-century Europe, societies of noblemen found they wanted a musical accompaniment to their meals, and musical entertainment for their parties and other social events, indoors and outdoors. The wind octet consisting of pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons — given its own German name, Harmonie — proved the ideal medium, and many aristocrats established their own private octets; even public taverns and other gathering-spots would engage the services of a professional wind band.
The Opera Transcriptions
At first most Harmoniemusik consisted of transcriptions of the popular operas (and occasionally symphonies) of the day; in fact such transcription became big business. In July 1782 Mozart wrote to his father:
“I am up to my eyes in work, but by next Sunday I have to arrange my opera [Abduction from the Seraglio] for wind instruments. If I don’t, someone will get to it before I do and reap the profits. You have no idea how difficult it is to arrange a work of this kind for wind instruments, so that it suits these instruments and yet loses none of its effect.”
Mozart seems never to have completed his transcription: all his operas in Harmoniemusik form have reached us through the pens of contemporaneous oboists and clarinetists: Georg Triebensee, Johann Nepomuk Wendt, Joseph Heidenreich. Mozart did, however, leave us evocative illustrations of the two most important social functions of this music: the open-air serenade in the Duet (no. 21) from Cosi fan tutte, and the banquet music in the Act II Finale of Don Giovanni (where the cast sings of the “popular operas of the day” — and the onstage band plays The Marriage of Figaro!).
Haydn’s Divertimenti
Haydn wrote most of his wind divertimenti in the 1760s, and they often followed the same five-movement scheme: a spirited introductory Allegro, followed by a minuet (or other “character” movement), then a more lyrical Adagio, then another minuet, and finally a relatively speedy rondo-finale (Haydn’s brother Michael referred to this type of finale Allegro as the “Auskegler” — literally the “bowl-out”). Tonight’s C major Divertimento follows this sequence, while the B-flat major Divertimento is in the alternative four-movement form, with the outside fast movements bracketing a slow movement and a minuet (the finale is not the typical “bowl-out,” but a lilting allegro that end quietly.)
Usually modest and practical, Haydn apparently did not often think of himself as a pioneering musical genius, but rather as a self-described “master musical craftsman” fulfilling the commissions of his patrons and public. (His uncle and great-uncle had been master coach builders.) Later in life he did shed some of his (false?) modesty: contemplating his princely employer’s 1766 move from Eisenstadt to Esterhazy (even farther from Vienna, one of Europe’s liveliest musical capitals), Haydn wrote:
“My prince was content with all my works, I received approval, I could — as head of an orchestra — make experiments, observe what created an impression and what weakened it, thus improving, adding to, cutting away, and running risks. I was set apart from the world, there was nobody in my vicinity to confuse and annoy me in my cause, and so I had to become original.”
Mozart’s Serenade
Early April 1782 was a decisive moment in the history of windband music: Emperor Joseph II established his kaiserliche Harmonie (imperial wind octet), fueling a demand for new octets (along with the ubiquitous opera transcriptions). It is likely that Mozart composed his Serenade in E-flat major in late July 1782 for Joseph’s musicians. Noted Mozart scholar Robert Levin has observed:
“The fact that Mozart avoids fatiguing the listener with a surfeit of the same sonorities, in music with a necessarily limited dynamic and instrumental range, bears eloquent testimony to his genius. The richness of the trio to the first minuet — and its length — demonstrates that by this point in his artistic journey, Mozart insisted that even entertainment music rise above chatty superficiality. As is so often the case with Mozart, it is the slow movement, at the center of the work’s structure, whose warmth of sentiment forms the crown of the serenade. Closing one’s eyes today during an outdoor performance of this work, it is easy to picture the evocative atmosphere of Vienna in the 1780s forever idealized in works such as this.”
Since an outdoor performance in Boston in February is impractical, we offer tonight’s serenade in the eighteenth-century beauty of Faneuil Hall.
