Behind the Musik: Mozart Jupiter

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra

Directed by Rachel Podger

Live performances:
September 27–29, 2024 at Koerner Hall, TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning

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Program

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Incidental music from Thamos, King of Egypt
Maestoso/Allegro
Andante
Allegro
Allegro vivace assai

Concerto for violin in D Major, K.211
Allegro moderato
Andante
Rondeau: Allegro
Rachel Podger, soloist

INTERMISSION

Symphony no. 41 in C Major, “Jupiter”
Allegro vivace
Andante cantabile
Menuetto & Trio
Molto allegro

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Rachel Podger

Principal guest director & violin soloist

“Rachel Podger, the unsurpassed British glory of the baroque violin,” (The Times) has established herself as a leading interpreter of baroque and classical music. Fresh from being announced as the winner of two 2023 BBC Music Magazine Awards for Instrumental Recording and Recording of the Year, as 23/24 Artist in Focus for Kings Place, and with two new albums released this month, Principal Guest Director Rachel Podger was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Royal Academy of Music/Kohn Foundation Bach Prize in October 2015, Gramophone Artist of the Year 2018, and the Ambassador for REMA’s Early Music Day 2020. A creative programmer, she is the founder and Artistic Director of Brecon Baroque Festival and her ensemble Brecon Baroque.

Following an exciting and innovative collaboration, A Guardian Angel, with the vocal ensemble VOCES8, Rachel was thrilled to be one of the Artists in Residence at the renowned Wigmore Hall in 2019/2020. Alongside this, Rachel and Christopher Glynn released the world premiere of three previously unfinished Mozart sonatas as completed by Timothy Jones (2021). Their second disc together of three Beethoven Sonatas was released in March 2022. Recent recordings include a disc of solo repertoire along with a recording of C.P.E. Bach sonatas with fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout.

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra

Access full bios for core orchestra members at tafelmusik.org/orchestra

*Cello chair generously endowed by the Horst Dantz and Don Quick Fund

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Program Notes

by Charlotte Nediger

Thamos, King of Egypt

Musical opportunities in 18th-century Salzburg were limited, and Leopold Mozart actively sought a more suitable environment for his young son Wolfgang’s remarkable talents. The childhood travels, where the prodigy was paraded around Europe, ended with Wolfgang’s teenaged tours to Italy. Leopold had hoped to establish a career as an opera composer for Wolfgang in Italy, and despite some success in Milan, the endeavour ultimately failed. Nonetheless, his time in Italy left Wolfgang with a passion for the theatre, both musical and non-musical, and it’s easy to imagine that he was thrilled when the renowned playwright Baron Tobias Philipp von Gebler approached him in 1773 to write incidental music for his five act heroic drama Thamos, König in Ägypten. Gebler’s drama was to be produced at Vienna’s Kärtnerthor Theater, a coup for the 17-year-old Mozart. He at first contributed two choruses; the incidental music we are performing this week date from later revivals. One can sense the youthful energy and lively imagination in the music, written to heighten the drama on stage. The play is a Masonic allegory, and was Mozart’s first introduction to the Freemasonry movement that was to play an important role in both his personal and professional life. Already in the opening chords of the first entr’acte, one gets a glimpse of his later Masonic works, most notably of The Magic Flute.

Violin Concerto in D Major
We celebrate Mozart for his genius as a composer, and know that he was one of the leading keyboard players of his day. In the shadow of this brilliance, we often overlook that he was also a skilled violinist. He performed as a violin soloist in the 1770s in Salzburg, Vienna, Augsburg, and Munich, and after one such performance wrote to his father in a facetious tone, “I played as if I were the greatest fiddler in all of Europe.” Leopold, author of a famous treatise on playing the violin and ever a teacher, replied to his son, “You yourself do not know how well you play the violin; if only you will do yourself credit and play with energy, with your whole heart and mind, yes, just as if you were the first violinist in Europe. Many people do not even know that you play the violin, since you have been known from childhood as a keyboard player.”

Among the solos he performed would undoubtedly have been his own violin concertos. The first was written in 1773, the year of the commission of the Thamos music. The Concerto in D Major, K.211, is the first of four additional concertos written two years later in a period of just six months. When published in 1802 it was titled “Concerto facile” (Easy Concerto), this at a time when virtuosity and bravura were praised above all else. There is in fact nothing easy about playing a Mozart concerto, which demands of the player mastery of poise and clarity, and a beautiful, expressive tone.

Symphony no. 41
In 1781 Mozart broke all ties with Salzburg and moved to Vienna, where he quickly established a busy and relatively lucrative freelance career: teaching, composing, and performing. His early success, however, proved difficult to maintain, and by the end of the decade Mozart was continually plagued with financial difficulties. Count Arco (steward to Mozart’s employer in Salzburg, Prince-Archbishop Colloredo) had warned Mozart when he left: “[in Vienna] a man’s success is of short duration. At the outset one reaps all possible praises and earns a great deal of money as well, that is true—but for how long?—after a few months the Viennese want something new again.” If Mozart’s popularity had waned, so too had that of the type of concerts which had contributed to his success: Austria was struggling through an economic recession, was at war with Turkey, and was watching political developments in France with trepidation. In this atmosphere, culture took a back seat: many noblemen disbanded their private bands, and opportunities for performance were reduced.

By 1788 Mozart was in serious debt, as attested in a series of heart-rending letters to his fellow Mason, Michael Puchberg, pleading for money. In all, Puchberg lent Mozart 1,415 gulden, a significant sum. Mozart’s wife Costanze’s health was suffering from the strain of repeated pregnancies, and on June 29 the Mozarts’ fourth child, Theresia, died at the age of six months. Three days earlier, Mozart had completed Symphony no. 39 in E-Flat Major. Symphony no. 40 in G Minor followed four weeks later, and Symphony no. 41 in C Major just two weeks after that. These last three symphonies of Mozart were apparently composed neither on commission, nor with any concrete plans for performance, and as such are exceptional. It is possible that Mozart led performances of the works during his travels to Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin, undertaken in search of renewed fame and fortune outside the confines of fickle Vienna.

Mozart’s final three symphonies are remarkable and widely contrasting works, from the festive Symphony 39 and poignantly passionate Symphony 40, to the triumphant Symphony 41. Together they are a summation of his symphonic journey, celebrating what had come before while looking boldly to the future.

Mozart’s contemporary Ernst Ludwig Gerber described Symphony 41 as “the overpoweringly great, fiery, artistic, pathetic, sublime Symphony in C.” The nickname “Jupiter” was first attached to the symphony in British concert programs in the early 19th century. In German-speaking countries, it was known as “die Symphonie mit der Schlußfuge” (the symphony with the final fugue), and indeed the finale is considered one of the marvels of classical music. It is saturated with imitative counterpoint: no fewer than five themes are tossed around the orchestra with deftness and energy. Mozart’s genius and daring shine forth in the extraordinary coda, the famous Schlußfuge. All five motives are brilliantly juxtaposed using a daring technique known as “invertible counterpoint”: all possible combinations and permutations are presented in a dazzling display of musical fireworks. Mozart could not have known that this was to be his last symphony, but in a wonderful coincidence he chose for the opening theme of this finale a motive derived from plainchant, the opening of the hymn Lucis creator (do-re-fa-mi). He had used this same theme in his very first symphony, composed in 1764 at the age of eight.

The Mozart scholar Neal Zaslaw notes that we tend to underestimate just how revolutionary the “Jupiter” symphony is in its ideas and their working out. Mozart was a son of the Enlightenment, and Zaslaw suggests that this final symphony “perhaps gives us a glimpse of Mozart’s dreaming of escaping his oppressive past and giving utterance to his fondest hopes and highest aspirations for the future.” Those soaring ideals can be heard in this remarkable symphony in C major, considered by many at the time to be “the key of light.” The text of the Gregorian hymn that opens the last movement translates as “Creator of light, by whom each day is kindled out of night, who when the heavens were made, didst lay their rudiments in light.”