Symphony No. 35 in D, K. 385, “Haffner”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

[1782]

Just a year after his move to Vienna, Mozart was “up to his eyes in work” during the whirlwind summer of 1782, as he detailed in a letter to his father. He had just prepared the opera Abduction from the Seraglio for its premiere, and he was rushing to arrange the score for a woodwind ensemble. (“Otherwise someone will beat me to it and secure the profits instead of me,” he wrote.) He also moved houses, and he was arranging his wedding to Constanze Weber on the sly without tipping off his disapproving father quite yet.

In the midst of all this activity, Leopold asked his son to write a serenade for the ennoblement of Sigmund Haffner, a boyhood chum of Wolfgang’s and the son of Salzburg’s mayor. Mozart completed a first movement within a week, and he dispatched subsequent movements as quickly as he could in the following weeks, not even making copies to keep himself.

Mozart remembered the score when he was preparing music for a self-produced concert, and he asked his father to send back the manuscript. When it arrived months later, Mozart replied, “My new Haffner symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every single note of it. It must surely produce a good effect.”

When Mozart converted the original serenade into a symphony, he dropped the introductory march and added flutes and clarinets to the outer movements. The Allegro con spirito launches the symphony with regal leaps up an octave, a rousing motive that suits the music’s ceremonial origins.

The spaciousness of the slow movement owes much to its use of repeated notes that bounce lightly to stretch out harmonies and melodic phrases. In the Menuetto third movement, trumpets and timpani provide unusual heft, counterbalanced by a central trio section with a pastoral melody in the oboes.

Mozart probably went too far for a lighthearted serenade in his finale, with all its boisterous humor, rude surprises, and drama worthy of the operatic stage. We don’t know how it was received in stodgy Salzburg in its original form, but it was a hit with the discerning crowd at Vienna’s Burgtheater in its new symphonic guise.

Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings