SINFONIA CONCERTANTE IN E-FLAT MAJOR FOR VIOLIN AND VIOLA, K.364

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Written / 1779

Movements / Three

Style / Classical

Duration / Thirty minutes

In 1779, Mozart was back in Salzburg after a sixteen-month sojourn seeking a job befitting a composer of his talents. The trip took him as far as Paris, but he also visited the influential centers of Munich and Mannheim. Despite some artistic triumphs, Mozart didn’t find the job he so desperately needed. Tragically, Mozart’s mother, who was traveling with him, died in Paris. Now he had to return home to Salzburg to accept a paltry appointment from the Archbishop as organist and concertmaster. Having tasted independence, he was back under the suffocating dominance of his father. And he chaffed at all of the rules and regulations of his employer: “It is not Salzburg itself but the Prince and his conceited nobility who become every day more intolerable to me.”

Mozart was not an “autobiographical” composer. Rarely does any composition of his let you know what was actually going on in his life while he was writing it. The music of 1779 gives us no hint of how miserable Mozart really was.

He wrote three symphonies, several masses, two groups of Vespers, a serenade and divertimento for winds and strings, a concerto for two pianos, and this Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola. Maynard Solomon, Mozart’s masterful biographer, said that with this music “there is a shift toward quite unexpected conceptions of beauty, which now embody a sense of restlessness and instability, and even of the dangerous or uncanny.” Mozart has given us no clues who he wrote Sinfonia Concertante for, or why he wrote it. He did play the violin—he probably wrote most of his violin concertos for himself—and also the viola, but there is no evidence that he ever played either part of this work himself. It is remarkable that this “symphony that acts like a concerto,” the greatest and most profound of any of his string concertos, was written by an unhappy man.

The three movements all have a distinct character. The first movement has the somewhat unusual tempo marking of majestic, but that is just what it is. The second is like a tragic opera duet with two lovers singing passionately to each other. The ebullient finale gives each player the opportunity to show off.

© 2022 John P. Varineau