This week Donald Macleod explores the miraculous chamber music of Mozart's Vienna years. Today, a sonata for a love-struck pupil; some serious serenading; and Mozart gets married.
When Mozart found himself forcefully ejected from his position at the Salzburg court of Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, it was just what he wanted; he had become bored with the cosily comfortable but suffocating confines of life in livery and was itching to try his luck as a freelance composer and performer in the musical capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna. His first priority was making a living, and the fastest route to doing that was to take private pupils. One such was Josepha Auernhammer, a musically gifted but - at least in Mozart's eyes - personally unprepossessing young woman who quickly developed a crush on him. Her feelings were not returned, but Mozart did toss off a dashingly galant masterpiece to perform with her: his Sonata in D for two pianos, K 448. Much more serious in tone was his contribution to what was traditionally considered a somewhat light-weight genre; the Serenade in C minor for pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons is more of a symphony for wind instruments than the usual brand of superior aristocratic background music. The month after he wrote that serenade, his persistent serenading of a young soprano, Constanze Weber, finally paid off when she became Constanze Mozart. As Mozart had explained in a letter to his father Leopold - who was not at all happy with the match - his disposition was "inclined to a peaceful and domesticated existence", and evidently Constanze was the key. She had, Mozart said, "no wit", but she made up for it with "enough common sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother". Praise indeed!
Rondo in A for string quartet, K 464a
Emerson Quartet
Sonata in D for two pianos, K 448
Murray Perahia, Radu Lupu, (pianos)
Serenade in C minor for 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 horns and 2 bassoons ('Nacht Musik'), K 388
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Show less