Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

[1787]

When composers of Mozart’s day were asked to entertain their patrons with party music, they usually dashed off bland, lighthearted pieces that were hardly worth reusing or remembering. But for young Mozart, his side gigs at private functions in his hometown of Salzburg were a welcome relief from his official church job, and he relished his opportunities to write and perform those crowd-pleasing divertimentos, serenades, and nocturnes.

After Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781 to set out as a freelancer, his career shifted away from that style of private entertainment, but the relatively few serenades and divertimentos he wrote in those years were crafted just as impeccably as his symphonies and concertos. The last example came from 1787, around the time he was writing Don Giovanni. No record remains of what prompted it, only an entry in his log of compositions listing Eine kleine Nachtmusik, meaning “a little Serenade.”

The first movement opens with one of the most memorable pairings in all of music: a questioning rise, answered by a balanced descent, each speaking in unadorned octaves. Mozart’s genius, even in “light” music, was to find delight and surprise within such straightforward gestures, as in the whimsical key change that jumpstarts the central development section.

In calling the second movement a Romanze, Mozart referenced a tradition of tuneful music inspired by an earlier song style. The long skeins of melody remind us that Mozart was always, at heart, an opera composer.

The Menuetto borrows the courtly, three-beat stride of the French minuet, while the contrasting trio section glosses the melodies with slurred phrases. The finale takes the shape of a rondo that returns at key junctions to the main theme, each entrance prefaced by an upward arpeggio that echoes the serenade’s memorable first phrase.

Strings