Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, ‘Haffner’

Program notes

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.