Leopold Mozart

(1719–1787)

Symfonier

Leopold Mozart’s reputation as a violinist, pedagogue and composer was eclipsed early on by his renown as the father of an astonishing child prodigy, his son Wolfgang Amadeus. In the time prior to Wolfgang’s birth, however, Leopold held a respected position at the Salzburg court and had achieved European fame not only through his highly regarded violin tutor, the Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, but also his compositions, and his symphonies in particular.

Leopold was born at Augsburg on 14 November 1719, the son of a local bookbinder, and during his early years at the Augsburg Gymnasium (1727–1735) and the Lyceum adjoining the Jesuit school of St Salvator (1735–1736), he frequently performed as an actor and singer in theatrical productions; by his teens he was also an accomplished organist and violinist. Mozart broke with his family in 1737 and matriculated at the Salzburg Benedictine University, studying philosophy and jurisprudence; he took a bachelor of philosophy degree the next year, with public commendation, but in September 1739 – for reasons that have never been explained – he was expelled for insolence, indifference and poor attendance. Shortly afterwards he became a valet and musician to Johann Baptist, Count of Thurn-Valsassina and Taxis, Salzburg canon and president of the consistory. It was to Thurn-Valsassina that Mozart dedicated his earliest surviving works, the Sonate sei da chiesa e da camera, Op.1 (1740).

During the early 1740s, Mozart’s local reputation as a violinist and composer – by this time he had written several German Passion cantatas and some instrumental works, possibly including symphonies – led to his appointment in 1743 as fourth violinist in the court orchestra of Archbishop Leopold Anton Freiherr von Firmian; in addition to his duties at court, he taught violin to the choirboys of the cathedral oratory and, later, keyboard. By 1758 he had advanced to the post of second violinist and in 1763 to deputy music director. His violin tutor was published in 1756, the year of Wolfgang’s birth, and found immediate success throughout German-speaking Europe; Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg wrote in his influential Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik:

A work of this kind has long been wished for, but one had hardly dared to expect it... What the famous [violinist] Geminiani was able to do for the English nation, the excellent Mozart has done for us Germans, and in providing us with a work of this nature has proved himself worthy of general approbation.

Even before its publication, however, Mozart was already well-known. His compositions circulated widely in Austria and Germany and in 1755 Lorenz Mizler petitioned for his membership of the prestigious Societät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften in Leipzig.

Among the chief works by which Leopold established his compositional renown, his symphonies take pride of place. They far outstrip in quality, to say nothing of quantity, the symphonies of his Salzburg contemporaries or, for that matter, most other early composers of symphonies in Europe. More than seventy such works survive or are known to have existed at one time (several are now lost). And it is clear from his letters that Leopold considered himself a modern, up-to-date composer, a claim borne out not only by the works themselves but by later musicologists’ frequent inability to distinguish between his more mature works of the later 1750s and early 1760s, and the juvenile works of his son: a case in point is his so-called ‘New Lambach’ symphony, which was incorrectly claimed for Wolfgang for the simple, biographical-wishful-thinking reason that it struck listeners as more ‘modern’ than another contemporaneous work attributed to him. Indeed, Leopold’s symphonies are for the most part finely wrought, and while the early ones share the generic and stylistic ambiguities common to other mid-century symphonies, the most mature of them approximate symphonies by composers a generation younger and show clear progress toward a style including full sonata forms, clearly defined phrase structure, and a well-defined difference between gestures appropriate, at the time, to orchestral as opposed to chamber music.

Symphony in C major, C 1

1. Allegro assai
2. Menuet e trio
3. Andante
4. Presto

Symphony in C major, D 1

1. Allegro
2. Menuet e trio
3. Andante
4. Allegro

Symphony (Partia) in C major, C 4

1. Allegro moderato
2. Menuet e trio
3. Andante
4. Presto

The broad range of Leopold’s symphonic style is on clear display in the symphonies recorded here. Two of them – C 1 and D 1 – cannot be dated with any certainty, although it is likely both were composed before 1760. Both have minimal scorings common to the time: two violins, viola, bass and two horns in the case of C 1 and the same ensemble, without violas, in D 1. This slight scoring is allied, at least in the case of the D major symphony, to the ambiguity between orchestral and chamber music usual at the time, and to musical gestures that could be appropriate for either type of music; indeed, Leopold even called it a ‘Sinfonia da camera’ although that might also refer to an intended intimacy of venue, not necessarily a performance style. The Partia C 4 is similar in this regard. Although there is no documentary evidence to date it before 1767, it, too, probably originated during the 1750s. Its character led to its being understood, about fifty years later, as a piece of chamber, not orchestral, music: the earliest references to the work, from monastic and courtly music catalogues compiled in 1767 and 1768, describe it as a symphony and give the scoring as two violins, two violas and bass; the sole surviving source, on the other hand, a set of manuscript parts from about 1810, now in Zurich, changed the title to the more chamber-like ‘Quintetto’ and the scoring to the non-orchestral two violins, two cellos and bass.

Symphony in D major, D 17

1. Presto assai
2. Andante staccato
3. Presto

Symphony in G major, G 14

1. Allegro moderato
2. Adagio
3. Presto assai

Symphony in D major, D 25

1. Allegro
2. Andante non poco
3. Presto

The three other symphonies may be slightly more recent. D 17 was advertised for sale by the important Leipzig publisher Breitkopf in 1761, the earliest recorded date for G 14 is 1767, and the symphony D 25 has the notation ‘1771 compos:’ on its wrapper. If this date is correct, it would make D 25 the latest of all Leopold’s symphonies, but the notation is not authentic and there is no reason to believe it, although the symphony does, at least in general terms, correspond closely with what can be described as Leopold’s ‘late style’, including a ‘modern’ three-movement structure with an Allegro, Andante and Presto finale, rather than the more common Minuet and Trio that concludes many earlier symphonies. Indeed, D 25 and G 14 alone among these works are based on exactly this succession of movement types.

It is not true, in any case, that after about 1760 Leopold entirely gave up both violin instruction and composition in order to devote himself to the education of his children, as Nannerl Mozart later claimed. Leopold continued to perform his own works, to direct the court music, to teach violin, to arrange for the purchase of music and musical instruments, to hire personnel, and to attend to numerous other details as part of his court duties well into the 1770s. Nevertheless, he felt that his primary responsibility was to Wolfgang, not only as a father and teacher but also as a missionary for the boy’s genius and to that extent he did compromise his own career in Salzburg. His final decade was one of rebuffs, setbacks at court and personal tragedy. His wife died in Paris in 1778 while accompanying Wolfgang on tour and Leopold was subsequently compelled to mediate in the ever worsening relations between his son and Archbishop Colloredo. Yet his efforts came to nothing when in 1781 Mozart left the Archbishop’s service and took up permanent residence in Vienna. By the time he died in May 1787, estranged from his son, Leopold was probably a broken man. But he was not forgotten by his friends. On the day he was buried in the cemetery of St Sebastian, Dominicus Hagenauer, Abbot of St Peter’s in Salzburg and a long-time family friend, noted in his diary:

The father who died today was a man of much wit and sagacity who would have been capable of rendering good service to the state even apart from music. He was the most correct violinist of his time... but had the misfortune of being always persecuted here [in Salzburg] and was not as much favoured by a long way as in other, larger places in Europe.

Cliff Eisen (2008)