Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Born 1756; died 1791)
The incomparable and inimitable Mozart was the lone surviving son of a proud, shrewd, exploitative father. Leopold toured the boy and his sister, Nannerl, as prodigies between 1762 and 1773, from London to Italy via Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and, of course, Vienna, the Hapsburg capital. Mozart, although frequently and seriously ill, including with typhus and smallpox, spent less than four years at home in Salzburg before 1773.
The arrival of a haughty, stingy new archbishop in 1771 curtailed father-son travel time (Leopold dropped Nannerl from the act in 1766). Grudgingly, Leopold sent his wife in 1777 to chaperone an ill-fated trip to Paris (where she died). En route, Mozart fell in love at Mannheim with Aloisia Weber, whose sister, Constanze, he happily married in 1783, without papa's approval.
Adagio and Fugue for string quartet (or string orchestra) in C minor, K. 546
Instrumentation: strings
The DPO last performed this piece in 2003, with Neal Gittleman conducting.
Mozart was originally composed the fugue of this pair for keyboard duet (K. 426) in 1783, a period during which Mozart was greatly interested in studying and learning from the contrapuntal techniques of Bach and Handel.
In 1788, Mozart arranged this austere fugue for string orchestra, prefacing it with what he termed in his thematic catalog "a brief Adagio" whose profundity of utterance belies its comparative brevity.
In its two-part structure, the work belongs to the tradition of Viennese church sonatas found in the works of such composers as Fux and Tuma. Quite why Mozart returned to his earlier fugue is not clear, and no one knows a practical purpose for the new work. It is, however, perhaps worth recalling that the summer of 1788 witnessed the composition of the three great final symphonies, No. 39 in E flat, K. 543, No. 40 in G minor, K. 550, and No. 41 in C, "Jupiter," K. 551 (K. 546 was entered in Mozart's catalog on June 22, the same day as the E flat symphony). Perhaps it would not be too far-fetched to link the orchestration of the fugue with the composition of the greatest of all Mozart's contrapuntal essays, the Finale of the Jupiter Symphony.
Biography by Roger Dettmer
Composition Description by Brian Robins
Source: All Media Guide
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