Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Born: January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 5, 1791, in Vienna, Austria

Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, Jupiter

• Composed:  July 25 (at earliest)–August 10, 1788
  
• Premiere: There is no evidence that this work was played during Mozart’s lifetime. Its first documented performance took place 28 years posthumously, on October 20, 1819, in Edinburgh, Scotland.
  
• CSO Notable Performances:
  • First: January 1897, Frank Van der Stucken conducting. 
  • Most Recent: March 2021, Louis Langrée conducting.
• Instrumentation: flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings
• Duration: approx. 31 minutes

In 1781, Mozart was finally dismissed from the Prince-Archbishop’s service, the rupture made official by the chief steward addressing his foot to the composer’s backside. Thus was launched Mozart’s final, glorious decade, which he spent in Vienna except for very occasional business travel. His symphonic output for these late years (“late” for a composer who would die at the age of 35) reached its summit in his final three symphonies — Nos. 39, 40 and 41 — produced in about nine weeks, in the summer of 1788. 

In No. 41, Mozart demonstrates his sheer brilliance as an orchestral composer. Its emotional range is wide indeed, prefiguring the vast expressive canvases that would emerge in the symphonies of Beethoven. In this work’s finale, he renders the listener slack-jawed through a breathtaking fugal display of quintuple invertible counterpoint, which in itself may be viewed as looking both backward, to the contrapuntal virtuosity we associate with Bach and Handel, and forward, to the dramatic power of fugue as demonstrated in many of the greatest compositions of Beethoven. 

As with the Sinfonia concertante, we know little about this work’s early performance history. There is no evidence that it was played in the composer’s lifetime; of the final triptych, only No. 40, in G minor, received a documented lifetime performance. We have no reason to doubt the account provided by the English composer and publisher Vincent Novello, who (with his wife) visited Mozart’s widow and their son Franz Xaver in 1829 and reported: “Mozart’s son said he considered the finale to his father’s Sinfonia in C — which Salomon christened the Jupiter — to be the highest triumph of instrumental composition, and I agree with him.” (Johann Peter Salomon was the violinist-impresario responsible for arranging Haydn’s two London residencies in the 1790s.) By the time Georg Nikolaus von Nissen published his groundbreaking Mozart biography, in 1828, the work’s reputation was firmly set. “His great Symphony in C with the closing fugue is truly the first of all symphonies,” declared Nissen. “In no work of this kind does the divine spark of genius shine more brightly and beautifully.”

—James M. Keller