Symphony No. 36 in C major, ‘Linz’, K. 425

Program notes

About the Work

The ‘Linz’ Symphony owes its existence to a stopover and a scheduling crisis. In the autumn of 1783 Mozart and his wife Constanze were travelling back to Vienna from a long, fraught visit to his father in Salzburg. They broke their journey in the Upper Austrian town of Linz, where the local Count Thun received them with open-handed hospitality and promptly arranged a concert. The trouble was that Mozart, by his own account, had not a single symphony of his own with him. In a famous letter to his father dated 31 October 1783, he wrote that he was composing a new symphony ‘at breakneck speed’ for the concert, to be given on 4 November.

That letter has made the ‘Linz’ a byword for Mozartian fluency: a full four-movement symphony conceived, written out, rehearsed, and performed in a matter of days. Whether every note was newly minted in Linz or whether Mozart drew on sketches he carried in his head, the result shows no trace of haste. It is the grandest symphony he had yet composed, scored for an orchestra with trumpets and timpani that lend it a festive, ceremonial brightness suited to a public occasion.

Its most celebrated feature comes at the very opening. The ‘Linz’ is the first of Mozart’s symphonies to begin with a slow introduction, a stately Adagio that precedes the fast first movement proper. The device was not his invention; he had absorbed it from the symphonies of Joseph Haydn, the older master he revered and whose example hangs over this whole score. By prefacing the Allegro with a weighty, harmonically searching prelude, Mozart announces a new seriousness of scale and ambition, and points the way toward the still grander symphonies that lay just ahead, the ‘Prague’ and the final trilogy.

It was written at a moment when Mozart, settled in Vienna since 1781, was establishing himself as the city’s leading composer-pianist. It catches him in full maturity yet still buoyant, the gravity of the slow introduction always balanced by an irrepressible forward energy. For a work supposedly dashed off to fill a gap in a count’s calendar, it has held the stage for nearly two and a half centuries.

What to Listen For

The slow introduction (Adagio) opens with a grand dotted gesture and then turns unexpectedly inward, the harmony darkening and the music seeming to ask a question before the main movement answers it. When the Allegro spiritoso arrives, notice how completely the mood lifts: bright, propulsive, full of the trumpet-and-drum sparkle that marks this as music for a public hall.

The second movement, an Andante in F major, is one of Mozart’s most unusual slow movements: it keeps the trumpets and timpani in play, giving the songful melody a faint undertow of ceremony and even melancholy beneath its grace. Listen for the way the soft drum-taps shadow the lyrical line.

The third movement is a sturdy, dancing Menuetto, its rustic central Trio handing the spotlight to the oboe and bassoon in a passage of countrified charm, a nod, perhaps, to the Upper Austrian town that gave the work its name. The finale (Presto) is pure high spirits: a fleet, witty sonata-form movement that races through its material with operatic timing, full of sudden dynamic surprises, and brings the symphony to a brilliant, exhilarating close.