Vienna 1783, London 1792, and a Box of Toys

About the Work

Joseph Haydn wrote this symphony in London in 1792, towards the end of his first visit to England. He had been brought there by Johann Peter Salomon, a violinist and impresario who put on concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms and also led the orchestra from the first desk. The twelve symphonies Haydn composed for London across two visits are numbered 93 to 104. No. 97 is the fifth of them by number, though it was the last to be written of the first group of six.

The first performance took place at the Hanover Square Rooms at the beginning of May 1792, either at Haydn’s own benefit concert on the 3rd or at Salomon’s concert on the 4th: the records do not settle which. Haydn directed. The symphony is in C major, and the scoring is for pairs of flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns and trumpets with timpani and strings.

Two details show how closely Haydn was writing for the people in front of him. The minuet has no repeat signs: every repeat is written out in full, because he changes the instrumentation each time round. And at the very end of the trio he marked a few bars for ‘Salomon solo’, sending his concertmaster an octave above the rest of the first violins, quietly, so that the man who had brought him to London could be heard on his own for a moment.

The symphony had an afterlife. The young Beethoven took it as the model for a C major symphony that he sketched and never finished. It lasts about twenty-five minutes.

What to Listen For

I. Adagio. Vivace. The slow introduction is soft and searching and takes its time to settle in the home key. Then the Vivace bursts in with a fanfare that simply spells out the C major chord, the kind of gesture that usually ends a movement rather than starting one. The second theme is a Ländler, an Austrian country waltz, over plucked basses.

II. Adagio ma non troppo. A set of variations in F major on a quiet, strolling tune. A stormier variation in the minor interrupts. In the variation that comes after it Haydn asks the violins to play close to the bridge (sul ponticello), which gives a thin, glassy, slightly metallic sound.

III. Menuetto and Trio: Allegretto. A broad, public minuet in which the scoring keeps changing. In the last eight bars of the trio, listen for the single violin riding above the others: that is Salomon’s solo.

IV. Finale: Presto assai. A quick, playful finale, full of stops, starts and conversations between the sections, rounded off with trumpets and drums.

About the Work

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart settled in Vienna as a freelance musician, his best way of earning money and a name was to appear as soloist in his own piano concertos. In the winter of 1782 to 1783 he wrote a set of three for his subscription concerts: K. 413 in F, K. 414 in A and this one in C, which he himself called the third of them. They were the first concertos he composed for those concerts.

The C major is the grandest of the three. Its orchestra includes trumpets and timpani alongside the oboes, bassoons, horns and strings, and the opening has a military swagger. Mozart played it at the academy (a benefit concert for himself) that he gave at the Burgtheater in late March 1783. The date usually given is 23 March, although a newspaper report of the time implies the 22nd. Emperor Joseph II was in the audience and, contrary to his habit, stayed for the whole evening. The same concert included the new ‘Haffner’ Symphony, which closes tonight’s programme.

Commentators have sometimes been cool about this concerto, complaining that the piano’s material in the first movement does not quite live up to the promise of the orchestral opening. The finale is the most unusual part of the piece. Mozart had first thought of a slow movement in C minor, set the idea aside in favour of a lighter one in F major, and then found a place for the minor-key music inside the finale instead.

The concerto lasts about twenty-five minutes.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro. The orchestra begins quietly, with the violins entering one after another in imitation, and builds to a full, festive tutti with trumpets and drums. When the piano comes in, it brings its own, more decorative ideas. Listen for a rising unison figure, like a rocket going up, that recurs in the closing sections.

II. Andante. A simple song in F major, with the melody spun out in long, ornamented lines by the soloist.

III. Allegro. A cheerful rondo in 6/8 time that is twice stopped in its tracks by a short Adagio in C minor, as if a scene from a serious opera had wandered into a comedy. After the last return of the rondo tune the music does not build to a loud finish. It thins out, scatters and ends pianissimo.

About the Work

The piece on tonight’s programme comes with a question mark attached, and the festival’s own listing says so: a Cassatio in G major catalogued among Leopold Mozart’s works, ‘probably’ his arrangement of the so-called Toy Symphony, which is itself now attributed to someone else.

A cassation was an eighteenth-century entertainment piece in several short movements, a cousin of the serenade and the divertimento. In 1953 the scholar Ernst Fritz Schmid published a seven-movement Cassation in G under Leopold Mozart’s name. Three of its movements turned out to be the music long known as the Toy Symphony, a piece in which a string band is joined by children’s instruments: a cuckoo, a quail call, a toy trumpet, a drum and a rattle among them. Such toys were a speciality of Berchtesgaden, a town in the mountains not far from Salzburg, and early copies call the piece ‘Berchtesgaden music’.

For most of the nineteenth century the Toy Symphony was printed and performed as a work by Joseph Haydn. Later his brother Michael was proposed, then Leopold Mozart on the strength of the cassation. In the 1990s a manuscript came to light that points to Edmund Angerer (1740 to 1794), a Benedictine monk and choirmaster in the Tyrol, as the composer of a version in C major from the 1760s. On the current view Leopold did not write the toy movements but took them over, transposed, into a larger piece of his own and supplied the remaining movements. Scholars add that the matter may never be fully settled.

None of this affects the pleasure of the thing. The toy movements are plain, tuneful music for strings, a quick movement, a minuet and a finale, in which the bird calls and rattles arrive on cue like guests at a children’s party.

What to Listen For

Listen for which instruments the players produce and who is asked to play them: the falling two-note call of the cuckoo, the chirp of the quail, the dry clatter of the rattle, a trumpet with one note, a drum. Around the toy movements, the cassation is light entertainment music of the kind that Salzburg musicians were regularly asked to supply.

About the Work

In July 1782 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, newly established in Vienna, received a request from his father in Salzburg. Sigmund Haffner the Younger, of Salzburg, was about to be raised to the nobility, and a serenade was wanted for the celebrations. Mozart had written the Haffners a serenade once before, for a wedding in 1776. This time the timing could hardly have been worse. He was busy, and he was about to get married himself, on 4 August. He wrote the music in haste and sent it home to Salzburg a movement at a time.

A few months later he asked for the score back. He needed a new symphony for the academy he was planning at the Burgtheater in March 1783, and the serenade could be turned into one. He removed the opening march and one of its two minuets and added pairs of flutes and clarinets to the first and last movements to fill out the sound. The result was the Symphony in D major that still carries the Haffner name.

It was first heard at that academy, the date of which is usually given as 23 March 1783, with Emperor Joseph II in the audience. As was normal at the time, the symphony framed the evening: the first three movements opened the concert and the finale was held back to close it, with other works in between. The Piano Concerto K. 415, heard earlier tonight, was among them.

The scoring is for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, with timpani and strings. The symphony lasts about twenty minutes.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro con spirito. Mozart told his father that this movement should be played with fire. It opens with the whole orchestra leaping up in octaves, and that single idea drives nearly everything that follows: even the second theme is the first one in new clothes, a habit more typical of Haydn than of Mozart.

II. Andante. In G major, relaxed and graceful, serenade music at its most amiable. In the middle, where a development would normally go, the woodwind play a short passage like a quiet chorale.

III. Menuetto and Trio. A bright, emphatic minuet in D, almost all of it loud, with a smoother, gentler trio in A major.

IV. Presto. Mozart’s instruction for the finale was that it should go as fast as possible. It starts quietly in the strings and then explodes. Listeners have often noticed its kinship with the overture to The Marriage of Figaro and with Osmin’s gloating aria in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the opera Mozart had staged in Vienna only weeks before he wrote this movement. Watch for the sudden silences and the bursts of sound that follow them.