Symphony No. 6 (Mozart)

Symphony No. 6
by W. A. Mozart
Portrait of Mozart, 1763
KeyF major
CatalogueK. 43
Composed1767 (1767)
Movements4
ScoringOrchestra with continuo
Premiere
Date30 December 1767
LocationBrno
ConductorWolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Symphony No. 6 in F major, K. 43, was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1767 when he was eleven. According to Alfred Einstein in his 1937 revision of the Köchel catalogue, the symphony was probably begun in Vienna and completed in Olomouc, a Moravian city to which the Mozart family fled to escape a Viennese smallpox epidemic.

The symphony is in four movements. Its initial performance was at Brno on 30 December 1767. The autograph of the score is today preserved in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków.

Music

The instrumentation for the first performance was two flutes, two oboes, bassoon, two horns, strings, and continuo. The flutes are used in the second movement in place of the oboes. For the first time in a symphony, Mozart uses two obligatory viola parts.

This is Mozart's first four-movement symphony, in which he introduces the minuet and trio for the first time, a feature common in many of his symphonies thereafter. The movements are:

  1. Allegro, 4
    4
  2. Andante, 2
    4     in C major
  3. Menuetto and Trio, 3
    4
  4. Allegro, 6
    8

The Andante movement uses a theme from Mozart's early Latin opera Apollo et Hyacinthus, K. 38, in which "muted violins sing over pizzicato seconds and divided violas, a ravishing effect".

Musical scores are temporarily disabled.

First performance

The symphony was included in a concert arranged by a brother of Sigismund von Schrattenbach, Archbishop of Salzburg, given by the Mozart family (Leopold Mozart, the eleven-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus, and the fifteen-year-old Nannerl) on 30 December 1767 at the Taverna in Brno. A local clergyman recorded: "I attended a musical concert in a house in the city known as the 'Taverna', at which a Salzburg boy of eleven years and his sister of fifteen years, accompanied on various instruments by inhabitants of Brno, excited everyone's admiration."

Discography

Below is an incomplete list of recordings of the symphony:

Year Conductor Orchestra Label
1973 Neville Marriner Academy of St Martin in the Fields Philips Classics
1991 Charles Mackerras Prague Chamber Orchestra Telarc
1995 Nicholas Ward Northern Chamber Orchestra Naxos
2013 Ádám Fischer Danish National Chamber Orchestra Dacapo Records

Notes and references

  1. 1 2 3 Zaslaw, pp. 109–112
  2. ↑ Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (Score)
  3. ↑ Brown 2002, pp. 350–351.
  4. ↑ Kenyon, p. 143
  5. ↑ Quoted by Zaslaw, pp. 111–112, from O. E. Deutsch.

Sources