Cassation in G major, LMV VIII:7

Program notes

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.