World Premiere: October 16, 1791
Last HSO Performance: March 23, 2013
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, strings, solo clarinet
Duration: 25 minutes

Mozart harbored a special fondness for the graceful agility, liquid tone and ensemble amiability of the clarinet from the time he first heard the instrument as a young boy during his tours, and he later wrote for it whenever it was available. During his years in Vienna, he was especially impressed by the technical accomplishment and expressive playing of the clarinetist in the imperial court orchestra, Anton Stadler. Stadler was a Freemason, and, when Mozart joined the fraternity, the two musicians became friends close enough that Mozart loaned him money when he could, and even once gave him two gold watches to pawn when there was no cash at hand. The final accounting of Mozart’s estate after his death showed that Stadler owed him some 500 florins — several thousand dollars at today’s rate. Stadler also came out of the friendship with far more than just some of Mozart’s silver. In addition to the flawless Clarinet Concerto, Mozart wrote for him the Clarinet Quintet (K. 581), Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Viola (K. 498), clarinet and basset horn parts in the vocal trios, and clarinet solos in the opera La Clemenza di Tito. The Clarinet Concerto started as a work for basset horn (alto clarinet), strings, two flutes and two horns that was sketched as early as 1789. When Stadler conferred with Mozart about the solos in Tito, it seems that he encouraged him to revise the sketch into a full concerto for his instrument.

The Clarinet Concerto was the next-to-last work Mozart completed, followed before his untimely death in December 1791 by only the Masonic Cantata (K. 623) and the unfinished Requiem. The Concerto’s beauty, grace and deep emotion mark it as one of his supreme masterpieces. Only the greatest creator could have balanced music of such effortless formal perfection with the incipient Romantic sensibility pulsing beneath the work’s surface, a quality that the noted German musicologist Friedrich Blume wrote imparts “the impression of consummate equipoise and proportion.” The first movement is an exquisitely sculpted sonata-concerto form throughout which the dark, sensuous sound of the clarinet is carefully integrated into the orchestral texture. The simplicity of the theme and structure of the following Adagio belie the emotional depth of its music. The rondo-finale not only maintains the spirit of gaiety associated with that form, but also brings to it an entire world of feelings, by turns cheerful and somber, effusive and introverted.