On August 4, 1782 in Vienna, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart married Constanze Weber without the blessing of his father. Papa Leopold thought that the humble, uneducated girl was not worthy of his brilliantly talented son, and he made no secret of it. In an attempt to heal the family rift, the new Herr and Frau Mozart went to Salzburg the following summer for an extended stay. The visit changed little. Leopold spent the rest of his life telling his son what a poor choice of a wife he had made. Wolfgang tried to put a good face on the situation, but he was bitterly disappointed at the results of the Salzburg visit. He left the town of his birth on October 27, 1783, and never returned.

The Mozarts returned to Vienna by way of Linz, where they found a warm welcome. “When we arrived at the gates of Linz,” Mozart reported to his father on October 31st, “a servant was waiting there to conduct us to the palace of old Count Thun where we are now staying. I can’t tell you how they overwhelm us with kindness in this house. On Thursday, November 4th, I am going to give a concert in the theater, and since I haven’t a single symphony with me, I am up to my ears writing a new one which must be finished by then.”

The piece was completed on time, in the astonishing space of just five days. Such speed characterized the creation of many of Mozart’s works, and is an important indication of his compositional process: formulating a work completely in his head before committing it to paper. The Symphony begins with an introduction in slow tempo with chromatic inflections before the tempo quickens for the arrival of the energetic main theme. In the Andante, Mozart supplied the necessary pathos to balance the exuberance of the surrounding movements. The third movement is a cheerful Minuet, whose trio is reminiscent of an Austrian Ländlerm and the finale is filled with dashing vitality and irresistible joy.

As early as 1773, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) started talking about leaving his hometown Salzburg. He lamented the lowbrow tastes of its citizens and disliked writing music for its “coarse, slovenly, dissolute court musicians.” “Salzburg is no place for me,” he wrote to his father from Munich in 1777, where he openly advertised his availability for a permanent job.

It was Paris that held the greatest allure for the young Mozart. He went there at the age of twenty-two, accompanied by his mother, in March 1778. Except for the symphony he composed, his stay, which lasted just over six months, was a disappointment and a personal tragedy. Throughout their stay, his mother grew increasingly bored and unwell. She died in Paris early in July, shortly after the premiere of the new symphony.

When Mozart began to work on his symphony he had new ideas he had accumulated from his recent travels, particularly in Munich and Mannheim. In addition the resources available in Parisian orchestras, which were bigger than any he had ever heard (and filled with many superb players), prompted him to expand his palette, adding flutes and timpani, and, for the first time in his symphonies, clarinets as well. He scored his new symphony for the largest orchestra he had ever employed.

Like so many things in Mozart’s Paris sojourn, the rehearsals for his new symphony did not go well. “I was really frightened,” Mozart wrote home. “All my life I have heard nothing worse; you can’t imagine how they botched the symphony twice in a row and scratched away at it.” He asked for another rehearsal. There was no time, he was told. He went to bed that night “in a discontented and angry frame of mind,” and when he awoke in the morning he decided not to attend the concert. But then he changed his mind, only to discover that the Paris public was wild about his new music.

“In the middle of the opening allegro,” he wrote to his father, “there is a passage that I knew people would like; the whole audience was carried away by it, and there was tremendous applause”—during the movement, as well as at its conclusion. Having been told that Parisians liked their finales to begin boldly and loudly, using all the instruments on stage, Mozart deliberately began his quietly and with just the violins. When the full ensemble then burst in, after eight measures, the first-night audience started to clap, enjoying not only the music but the joke. “I was so happy,” Mozart said, “as soon as the symphony was over I went off to the Palais Royal and had a large ice.”

Mozart was 32 when he wrote his last three symphonies in the summer of 1788. Seven successful years as an independent composer-performer-impresario in Vienna had made him prosperous. However when the Austrian Empire, of which Vienna was the capital, declared war on the Ottoman Empire (today, Turkey) in February of that year, the Viennese economy fizzled, and Mozart’s career fizzled with it. His livelihood depended on the Viennese moneyed class, which dwindled as upper-class men left the city to serve as military officers, or went to their country estates to avoid questions about why they weren’t serving.

In June of 1788 Mozart moved his family from his apartment in the centre of Vienna to a more spacious suburban residence at Alsergrund 135 (today Währingerstraße 26), a seven-room apartment with a garden attached. The rooms were spacious and it is speculated that Mozart intended to use the large rooms for rehearsals of music he was about to compose. It was in this house that Mozart would compose his last three symphonies (Nos. 39, 40, and 41, all from 1788), and the last of the three Da Ponte operas, Cosi fan tutte, which premiered in 1790.

Evidently the music for Symphony 39 was already in Mozart‘s head as he made the move to Alsergrund and he finished it on June 25; No. 40 followed on July 26 and No. 41 on August 10. That’s two months give or take a few days, a compositional speed record for such masterpieces.

Contrary to common belief, Mozart heard and possibly performed the three symphonies. He had orchestra parts copied, an expense he would not have incurred unless he needed them for a performance and he went to the trouble of re-orchestrating the G-minor Symphony to add clarinets, an effort that would have made no sense unless the Symphony were going to be played.

Mozart included symphonies, most likely from this final set, in concerts he gave in Leipzig in 1789 and Frankfurt in 1790, and a Mozart symphony was performed at a concert led by Antonio Salieri in Vienna in 1791. Programs do not include numbers for these symphonies but it is not likely that Mozart would have passed up a chance to show off one or another of his new works. The orchestra for Salieri’s 1791 Vienna concert included the clarinetists Johann and Anton Stadler, probably the reason for the second version of the G-minor Symphony with clarinets.

The Symphony in E-flat is the only symphony from Mozart’s adulthood that does not use oboes, which means that the clarinets are given unusual prominence. It also has a slow introduction, a common feature in symphonies of the day, but rare in Mozart. This slow introduction is a grand procession eventually dissolving in a few misty bars before the energetic Allegro makes a cautious entrance.

The ambling Andante con moto and the energetic Minuet are typical of Mozart’s mature symphonies. The middle section of the Minuet, with one clarinet playing a simple but unforgettable little tune over the other clarinet’s bubbling arpeggios, would most likely have been composed with the Stadler brothers in mind.

Mozart’s finales are often remarkable for their sheer number of melodic ideas, but the finale of this Symphony relies essentially on a single theme, explored, varied and worked over in the style of Haydn.

Anton Stadler was born in 1753 in Bruck an der Leitha, 40 km southeast of Vienna. In 1756 his family moved to Vienna where his brother Johann was born. The pair were to become two of the finest clarinetists in the city.

In his day, Anton Stadler enjoyed a reputation far beyond the confines of Vienna as an excellent clarinetist and player of the basset horn. It is uncertain just when his friendship with Mozart began, but the two men were probably already acquainted by 1784, when Stadler performed “a large wind piece” by Mozart (perhaps the Gran Partita, K. 361) at an academy in Vienna. Whatever the case, the first time they are known to have played music together was on 20 October 1785, at a benefit concert for Vienna’s Masonic lodges. Stadler also experimented with the construction of the clarinet, adding to the length of the instrument which extended the range of the instrument downward by four semitones, creating what is called a basset clarinet.

At the peak of his compositional abilities and just weeks before his death, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the Clarinet Concerto in A major. He wrote it specifically for his friend and fellow freemason, Anton Stadler and for the basset clarinet which Stadler had created. This was hardly the first time Mozart wrote for Stadler. He was the intended player for numerous orchestral parts and several chamber works, including the “Kegelstatt Trio” K. 498 and the Clarinet Quintet K. 581.

Mozart gave Stadler the completed concerto on October 9th or 10th along with traveling money (about $3,000 today) to travel to Prague, and told the clarinetist to make use of the concerto at the benefit concert the artist had arranged in that city. Stadler arrived in Prague on October 13th or 14th and according to Prague city records, Stadler’s concert took place at the Royal Old City Theater on October 16th, 1791.

Like the original basset clarinet, the autograph of Mozart’s clarinet concerto was lost, or perhaps even pawned by Stadler on the European tour that followed the Prague benefit concert. The concerto we hear these days is a version edited by modern day publishers so it can be played on today’s instruments. Ms. Katz performs the Henle Edition edited by Henrick Wiese.

For this concerto, Mozart chose an orchestra with flutes instead of oboes, bassoons, no brass instruments except for two horns, and a full complement of strings, to make it possible for the soloist to be heard distinctly above the ensemble.

The first movement begins with flowing melodies that exploit the clarinet’s rich tone in an atmosphere of gracious lyricism.

The Adagio second movement is undoubtedly one of Mozart’s most sublime slow movements. This movement displays the exquisite singing quality of the clarinet and the musicality of the clarinetist. A reviewer wrote Stadler in 1784,

“Never should I have thought that a clarinet could be so capable of imitating a human voice so closely as it was imitated by thee.  Verily, thy instrument has so soft and lovely a tone that nobody who has a heart can resist it.”

The finale is a capricious rondo that captures the lighthearted, comical quality of the clarinet.  Mozart contrasts the rondo theme with other melodies that are harmonically adventurous and unexpectedly moving.

May 1 1786 Premiere of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro at the Burgtheater in Vienna with Mozart conducting, seated at the keyboard. PIC Early 19th-century engraving depicting Count Almaviva and Susanna in act 3

JAN 27 1756 Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart born to Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria née Pertl, at 9 Getreidegasse in Salzburg.

MAY 1 1786 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492 with an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna with Mozart conducting.

PIC Act 1: Cherubino hides behind Susanna’s chair as the Count arrives.