Mozart "Gran Partita"
Boulez Ensemble & Zubin Mehta
Musical Performance Ensemble & Orchestra 0Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Serenade Nr. 10 KV 361 "Gran Partita"
One thing that is certain about the Serenade in B-flat major is that it made a powerful impression on Mozart’s contemporaries. “I heard music for wind instruments today, too, by Herr Mozart, in four movements … oh, what an effect it made—glorious and grand, excellent and sublime!” The critic and writer Johann Friedrich Schink confided these remarks to his memoirs in reaction to a performance of the work at a benefit concert on March 23, 1784 organized for the clarinetist Anton Stadler (the inspiration for the later Trio, Quintet, and Concerto for clarinet, among other works). Mozart himself could not be present for the occasion—he was busy with his own subscription concerts of piano concertos—and, in the event, only four of the Serenade’s seven movements were performed.
But whether this marked the first time any of K. 361 was played for the public is just one of numerous unresolved questions surrounding this extraordinary Serenade. Some scholars have argued for an origin early after Mozart’s move to Vienna, in 1781 or 1782 (as determined by watermark analysis of the manuscript paper); it was even once speculated that Mozart had composed the piece to be performed as part of the wedding celebrations when he married Constanze in August 1782, much as the “Haffner” Serenade of 1776 had been commissioned for a wedding. On the other hand, stylistic analysis suggests similarities with other works from the fruitful year of 1784, around the time Mozart was becoming infatuated with the basset horn, one of Stadler’s specialties.
Still, the lack of further evidence makes it difficult to pin down what exactly occasioned K. 361; similarly, it is not known why Mozart chose this unusual (and not so easily programmable) assortment of 13 instruments, blending a dozen winds with one string (double bass)—the latter sometimes replaced by a contrabassoon, but, with the use of pizzicato notation, clearly intended for the string instrument. Around the center of four horns (two each in F and B flat), pairs of bassoons provide a bass foundation while the melodic lines and treble harmonies are formed by pairs of oboes, clarinets, and basset horns (a version of the clarinet whose sonority E.T.A. Hoffmann compared to “the scent of red carnations”). This abundance, and the sheer scope of the piece—“the largest work of the Classical period scored for solo instruments,” according to Bärenreiter—must be what prompted the moniker “Gran Partitta,” as it appears on the autograph score (this was an accepted alternative spelling of the era). But that is an intervention shown not to be in Mozart’s handwriting.
In principle, K. 361 belongs to the sphere of Harmoniemusik, or music played by wind ensembles. Typically, this was associated with occasions of outdoor entertainment or public ceremonies, the aristocrat’s more economical alternative to a house orchestra (such as the one for which Haydn composed while serving at the Esterházy estate), but Harmonie bands could also appear as street musicians.
This presents another curious puzzle with regard to the “Gran Partita”: Mozart clearly wrote something too substantial to be intended as entertaining “background music,” and the aforementioned scoring for 13 instruments is well beyond the usual contingent of six or eight players, as found in his other two wind serenades from the Vienna years, respectively: K. 375 in E-flat major from 1781 and K. 388 in C minor for wind octet from 1782–83 (along with his 1782 arrangement of his first opera hit for Vienna, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, for Harmonie band).
By choosing this genre, Mozart was responding to a new wave of interest in the Harmoniemusik prompted by Emperor Joseph II’s establishment in 1782 of an ensemble comprising the best wind players from the Burgtheater opera orchestra (which included Stadler among its ranks). At the same time, Mozart was hearkening back to the comparatively relaxed music-making of the youthful serenades and divertimentos he had written in his earlier Salzburg years, usually for particular celebratory occasions. The late biographer Maynard Solomon waxes poetic about the implications of Mozart’s “serenade style” as proceeding from “constant metamorphosis”: it conjures an “image of plenitude, springing from an overflowing abundance of unsullied idealism as yet untouched by any hints of morbidity, cynicism, or disillusionment … imbued with an innocent utopianism, a faith in perfectibility, beauty, and sensual fulfillment.” This is the realm, he adds, of Ernst Bloch’s “wishful landscape” in The Principle of Hope. Though dating from Mozart’s maturity, does the “Gran Partita” Serenade contain a dimension of nostalgia for this vanished idyll from his Salzburg past?
These generic and textural issues play a key role in our response to K. 361. It is no coincidence that this is the music playwright Peter Shaffer chose to dramatize Antonio Salieri’s very first encounter with the young newcomer who will drive him to murderous jealousy in his 1979 play Amadeus (made into the spectacularly successful 1984 film directed by Miloš Forman). Chancing upon an open score of the third-movement Adagio, Shaffer’s fictive Salieri is overtaken by mingled awe and envy by his colleague’s procedure: “On the page it looked like nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse—bassoons and basset horns—like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly—high above it—an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no music by a performing monkey!”
The slow introduction sets the stage for this expansive score, leading into a fast sonata movement anchored in Mozart’s mature Classical technique. A pair of minuets frames the aforementioned Adagio, each nesting two trio sections and thus offering greater variety amid the dancelike context. Mozart titles the fifth movement “Romance”—also an Adagio and also, like the third movement, in E-flat major, but intersected by a C minor Allegretto. A set of variations on the theme given by the clarinet follows. Mozart concludes this large work with a fast-paced rondo that is closer to the mood of “entertainment” associated with the older serenade format.
—Thomas May
Notes originally published in the Pierre Boulez Saal program book for the concert of the Boulez Ensemble and Zubin Mehta on July 7, 2022.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Serenade No. 10 in B flat major, K. 361 "Gran Partita"
Gregor Witt, Oboe
Fabian Schäfer, Oboe
Matthias Glander, Clarinet
Miri Saadon, Clarinet
Jussef Eisa, Basset horn
Ingo Reuter, Bassoon
Zeynep Koyluglu, Bassoon
Ben Goldscheider, Horn
Sebastian Posch, Horn
Ignacio Garcia, Horn
Thomas Jordans, Horn
Christoph Anacker, Double bass
Camera
Katharina Diessner
Florian Geyer
Anna Motzel
Johanna Piechotta
Musical Adviser
Sadra Fayyaz
Data Manager
Daniel Goede
Colour Grading
Stéphane Andrivot
TELDEX STUDIO BERLIN
Audio Producers
Friedemann Engelbrecht
Benedikt Schröder
HELIOX FILMS
Production Manager
Gaëlle Hoba
Production Assistant
Axelle Ragu
Executive Producer
Pierre-François Decouflé
UNITEL
Post-Production Manager
Roger Voß
Production Manager
Franziska Limmer
Producer
Magdalena Herbst