Music Reimagined

Travelers’ descriptions of late-18th-century Austria often remarked on one of the most beloved Austrian musical traditions, the street serenade. These works, variously titled Serenade, Cassation, Notturno, or Nachtmusik, were typically played by small ensembles hired to play for a lover, a friend, or a special event: engagements, weddings, or “name-days.” (Your name-day in Catholic Austria is the feast day of the saint for whom you are named.) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) wrote dozens of these pieces, ranging from simple marches to more substantial pieces like the famous Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) heard here. Most of Mozart’s serenades were written for a specific commission, or in a few cases, as gifts for his own friends—but the reason he wrote this work remains a mystery. He was busily engaged with the opera Don Giovanni at the time and must have had a reason to interrupt his work for the time it took to write the serenade (though probably just a few days, given Mozart’s typically furious speed of composition). It is not known whether the piece was ever performed during Mozart’s lifetime, or indeed if it was played before it was finally published around 1827. A final mystery concerns the work’s missing Menuet. Mozart kept a fairly meticulous running list of his own compositions, and his entry for August 10, 1787 lists “Eine kleine Nacht Musik, consisting of an Allegro, Menuet and Trio, Romanze, Menuet and Trio, and Finale.” However, at some point, someone removed the first Menuet and Trio from the manuscript. (A few modern performances include a movement reconstructed from one possible candidate for the missing Menuet suggested by Mozart’s biographer Alfred Einstein, but this is not generally accepted as authentic, and nearly all performances today are in four movements.) What is left, however, is a jewel of a work: essentially a compact little symphony for strings. All these mysteries aside, Mozart’s final serenade is today one of his most enduringly popular works.

The opening Allegro is set in sonata form and has two main sets of ideas: the first a bold fanfare-like figure and the second a more lilting idea with a chirpy conclusion. After treating these themes in a miniature development that begins abruptly in the minor and contains several surprising harmonic twists, the movement ends with a recapitulation and a brisk coda. The Romanza that follows is one of Mozart’s typically lovely slow movements, laying out a pair of gentle and relaxed main themes. These alternate with a pair of contrasting episodes, one dancelike and the other slightly agitated. The main theme of the Menuet is more folksy than usual for this courtly dance, with some similarities to the popular “German Dance” that was all the rage in Vienna’s dance halls in the 1780s. The central trio also sounds like peasant fiddling. Mozart rounds out Eine kleine Nachtmusik with a brisk rondo-form finale (Allegro). The main theme is an energetic idea heard at the beginning. In the course of the movement, he presents contrasting music but always finds witty ways to work back to this main idea.