Mozart's coming-of-age journey to Paris in 1777-1779 -- albeit with his mother as chaperone -- was not only circuitous but leisurely. When mother and son finally did reach Paris on March 23, 1778, he found the city that had hailed him as a prodigy 15 years earlier was now unhospitable -- indeed, inimical. He was able, however, to contact a quartet of visiting wind players from Mannheim, and on May 1 wrote to his "très cher Pére" that they asked him for a new piece to be performed at the Concert Spirituel in the Loge Olympique, Paris' most distinguished orchestral series. He claimed to have finished a "sinfonie [sic] concertante in the current popular style" for solo flute, oboe, bassoon, and horn, with an orchestra of two oboes, two horns, and strings. But the work, supposedly given to the Loge's impresario for copying, was set aside by the latter and subsequently lost. Mozart considered this to be another Parisian plot against him and in a later letter to Salzburg assured Papa Leopold that he could recreate the music from memory. But no manuscript has survived. Nevertheless, this composition turned up nearly a century later, in a hand not the composer's, with solo clarinet rather than flute. It became "K. Anhang 9/K. 297b" in the second edition (1905) of Ludwig Ritter von Köchel's storied Verzeichnis, originally published in 1862, and "K. Anhang C14.01" in the third version, edited by Alfred Einstein in 1937.
While Georges de Saint-Foix in 1932 and J.W. Turner in 1938 accepted it as authentic, The New Grove Mozart in 1982 concluded that "its credentials are dubious, and any music by Mozart that it may contain can only be in corrupt form." Even more recently, Robert Levin has written in the Mozart-Jahrbuch 1984/1985 that the orchestral part is authentic but the solo sections "adapted." Corrupt or not, the best pages are surely too beautiful to be spurious: the work overall has a recollective, even autumnal character found nowhere else found until the sublime B flat wind Serenade of 1781 (K. 361/370a).
All three movements are rooted in E flat major, a key shared by the "Jeunehomme" Piano Concerto (No. 9; K. 271) and the later Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola (K. 364/320d). The opening Allegro has three (rather than two) expositions of the principal and secondary subjects, first by the orchestra's strings, then twice by the solo quartet. Development and reprise ensue, with a through-composed cadenza before the coda. Though the nineteenth century source copy marked the middle movement Adagio, an Andante tempo is likelier, continuing in a vein of almost reflective lyricism with gentle exchanges of thematic material. Like the first movement, this one is in common time (4/4). The finale, Andante con variazioni, is in 2/4 until, after the last variation, six Adagio bars in common time lead to an Allegro coda in 6/8. There are ten variations altogether, each one 15 or 16 bars long, with identical, basically decorative orchestral ritornelli separating them. ~ Roger Dettmer, Rovi
Copyright © 2012 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.