Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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

Sinfonia concertante in E-flat Major for Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn and Orchestra, K. 297b

• Composed: 1778
• Premiere: unknown
• Instrumentation: solo oboe, clarinet bassoon and horn; 2 oboes, 2 horns, strings
• CSO Notable Performances:
  • First: November 1962, Max Rudolf conducting; soloists (CSO principals) Dennis Larson, Richard Waller, Otto Eifert and Michael Hatfield. 
  • Most Recent: January 1988, Jesús López Cobos conducting; soloists (CSO principals) Richard Johnson, Richard Waller, William Winstead and Robin Graham.
• Duration: approx. 32 minutes

Mozart arrived in Paris, chaperoned by his mother, on March 23, 1778, hoping that the music lovers of the French capital would recognize his genius and reward him with an appropriate position. With the help of Baron Friedrich Grimm, whom he had met on his first trip to Paris as a Wunderkind of seven in 1763, he was introduced to several of the aristocracy, though his treatment at their hands was something less than he had hoped for — his letters home often complain of being kept waiting in drafty anterooms and of having to perform on wretched harpsichords. 

In May, it appeared that Mozart’s foray into Parisian culture might be rewarded. He reported to his father that he had been offered the post of organist at Versailles, a job with light duties, six months' leave per year and proximity to the royal family. However, his longing was for the opera house (and for a sweetheart, Aloysia Weber, whom he had met on the stop in Mannheim while journeying to Paris), and he refused the post. “After all, 2,000 livres is not such a big sum,” he rationalized to his furious father. 

Mozart’s stay in Paris grew sad. His mother fell ill in June, and died the following month. He lingered in Paris, sorrowful and alone, until September 26, when, without the position he sought or the commissions he hoped to receive, he returned to Salzburg.

The musical highlight of Mozart’s Parisian venture was his association with the illustrious series of orchestral programs given by the Concert Spirituel under the direction of Joseph Legros. Legros commissioned him to write a symphony (No. 31 in D major, K. 297/K. 300a, Paris), several substitute movements for a choral Miserere by the Mannheim composer Ignaz Holzbauer (K. 297a, lost) and something in the sinfonia concertante form that was then popular with Parisian audiences. On April 5, 1778, Mozart announced in a letter to his father that he planned to write a sinfonia concertante for three Mannheim wind virtuosos then visiting Paris: Johann Baptist Wendling, flute; Friedrich Ramm, oboe; and Georg Wenzel Ritter, bassoon. Jan Václav Stich, better known by his assumed Italian name of Giovanni Punto (assumed when he bolted illegally from the service of a Bohemian nobleman to undertake a career as a touring musician), the greatest horn player of the day (Beethoven wrote his Horn Sonata, Op. 17 for Punto), was in Paris at the time, so Mozart also included a part for him in the score. The resulting Sinfonia concertante for Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Horn and Orchestra was composed quickly later that month and scheduled for performance by Legros. 

Mozart continued the tale in a letter dated May 1:  

The four soloists were, and still are, completely in love with [the work]. Legros had the score for four days for copying. But still I found it lying in the same place. Finally, the day before [the concert], I didn’t see it, but searched in a pile of music and found it hidden.... Two days later, when it should have been performed, I went to the concert. Ramm and Punto came to me in great heat and asked why my Sinfonia concertante was not being performed.... Ramm fell into a great rage and denounced Legros right there in the green room — in French — saying that it was ugly of him, and so on. 

Mozart was convinced (probably with cause) that Giovanni Cambini, who was dispensing sinfonia concertante literally by the dozens to the Parisian musical haute monde, had schemed to stop the performance of his new piece — one of Cambini’s specimens replaced Mozart’s on the program. At any rate, Mozart’s work was not performed in Paris in 1778, and he sold the only copy of the score to Legros when he left for home in the fall. He mentioned in a letter of October 3 that he could reproduce the work from memory whenever he wished, but there is no record that he ever did so, and the Sinfonia concertante for Winds was assumed lost for the next century.

It was not until a posthumous edition of Otto Jahn’s monumental biography of Mozart appeared in 1905 that further light was thrown on the Sinfonia concertante; Hermann Deiters, editor of that edition, located among Jahn’s papers a copy of a score for a Sinfonia concertante. Its style was Mozartian enough not to preclude its being the 1778 Paris piece, but the scoring was not for the specified flute, oboe, bassoon and horn, but rather for clarinet, oboe, bassoon and horn. Since Jahn left no mention of the source of his score, its authenticity has been open to question ever since it was discovered, though most Mozart scholars agree that the work as it has survived is basically authentic; a “computer-assisted” study by Robert D. Levin and Daniel N. Leeson in the early 1980s convinced those researchers that the work was genuine. (Levin also made a “reconstruction” for the original instrumentation and documented his endeavor in a book: Who Wrote the Mozart Four-Wind Concertante: Authenticity, Origin and Reconstruction. Pendragon Press, 1987.) Jahn’s score was tentatively accepted into the Mozart canon and has enjoyed success ever since, though the mystery of its provenance may never be solved.

Although the sinfonia concertante nominally bridges the genres of symphony and concerto, this example stands closer in style and form to the latter, as do Mozart’s other works in the form (Flute and Harp Concerto, Two Piano Concerto and Sinfonia concertante for Violin and Viola, all dating from 1778–79). Each of its three movements remains in the tonic key of E-flat major, a result both of Mozart’s recognition of the Parisian taste for harmonic simplicity (Legros asked him to write a substitute slow movement for the “Paris” Symphony because the impresario claimed the rich chordal peregrinations of the original confused his audience) and the inability of the wind instruments of the time to easily negotiate all but rudimentary chromaticism. The opening Allegro follows the traditional first-movement concerto form: orchestral introduction — presentation of the soloists — thematic elaboration — recapitulation of earlier themes. Its abundance of melodic materials, suavity of gesture and gliding grace would seem to dispel any doubts concerning its authenticity. The following Adagio is a sweet song shared by the wind quartet lightly supported by orchestra, a sort of slow, wordless madrigal updated into 18th-century style. The closing movement is a set of 10 variations on a theme of opera-buffa jocularity that exploits both the soloistic and conversational characteristics of the little clan of winds.

—©Dr. Richard E. Rodda