Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 ‘Turkish’

Program notes

About the Work

Mozart was nineteen when he wrote this concerto, and it is the last of the five violin concertos he composed in Salzburg. The Fifth is dated December 1775; the note written by Keith Horner for Rockport Music gives the day as 20 December, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday. Four of the five concertos belong to that one year, and after it he wrote no more of them.

Nobody knows for certain who was meant to play it. Mozart was a court musician in Salzburg and a far better violinist than his later fame as a pianist suggests, so he may well have played it himself. Antonio Brunetti, a violinist of the Salzburg court orchestra, certainly played these concertos, and for him Mozart later wrote a separate Adagio in E major, K. 261, as a substitute slow movement for this one. Brunetti is said to have found the original too studied. Violinists since have disagreed with him, and the original Adagio is the one normally played.

The orchestra is the small Salzburg band of two oboes, two horns and strings. What Mozart does with it is less modest. The concerto is full of moments where the expected thing does not happen, and the first of them comes when the soloist walks on.

The nickname ‘Turkish’ belongs to the finale. In the middle of a polite minuet, the music breaks into a loud, fast episode in A minor in a different metre. ‘Turkish’ music was a fashion in eighteenth-century Europe, on the stage and in military bands, and Mozart returned to it in the opera ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’ and in the Rondo alla Turca that ends one of his piano sonatas. Writers on the concerto point out that the style he had in mind was closer to Hungarian music from the borders of the Ottoman world than to anything actually Turkish. He has no drums or cymbals here, so he imitates them with the instruments he has.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro aperto. The orchestra begins alone with a brisk introduction (‘aperto’ means open). Then the violin enters, and instead of taking up the tune it plays six bars of Adagio, slow and sweet, as if the piece had started again somewhere else. When the Allegro resumes, the soloist has a new melody, and the orchestra’s opening theme turns out to be its accompaniment.

II. Adagio. The slow movement is in E major and is the most extended in any of Mozart’s violin concertos, laid out in full sonata form. The violin sings a long, unhurried line above the orchestra almost without interruption. This is the movement Brunetti wanted replaced.

III. Rondeau: Tempo di Menuetto. The refrain is a graceful minuet that keeps returning. Halfway through, the ‘Turkish’ episode arrives: the key turns to A minor, the three-beat minuet gives way to a quick two, and the music is suddenly all sharp accents and chromatic scales that swell and vanish. Listen for the cellos and double basses striking their strings with the wood of the bow, Mozart’s stand-in for percussion. Then the minuet comes back as though nothing had happened.