Mozart
Posthumous painting by Barbara Krafft in 1819
Drawing of Mozart in silverpoint, made by Dora Stock during Mozart's visit to Dresden, April 1789
-Divertimento No. 2 in D major, K. 131 (1772)
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Menuetto - Trio I - Trio II - Trio III - Coda
IV. Allegretto
V. Menuetto - Trio I - Trio II - Coda
VI. Adagio - Allegro molto - Allegro assai.
Cappella Accademica（カペラ・アカデミカ）
Conductor: Norihiko Yoshikawa（吉川 紀彦）
Hamamatsu U-Hall(Worker's Hall)
Shizuoka, Japan
October 20, 2018
As with many of Mozart’s first efforts in big public forms, we don’t know anything about the occasion for which he was writing. The pieces Mozart labeled divertimento, serenade, cassation, and notturno were all written to provide instant gratification, and as with so much of the music from this period, they were performed
just once, at a public ceremony or high society event, and then forgotten. As a result, many have disappeared without a trace; we are probably lucky this early divertimento has survived at all. (In 1757, the year after Wolfgang was born, his composer father Leopold boasted that he had written more than thirty pieces of serenade music; just one, recently discovered at that, is known today.) It is all the more remarkable that this D major divertimento, which Mozart clearly didn’t expect to live beyond its “premiere,” was written with the finesse, invention, and stylishness he would regularly lavish on operas and big-scale works he hoped might have a life of their own.
The divertimento K.313 is often said to be the earliest serenade-style work in which Mozart’s distinctive voice emerges. Maynard Solomon, our finest Mozart biographer today, suggests it may have been written to be played at a wedding, since the slow movement has the character of a serenader’s love song. The score holds no other clues about its origins or function; the word “divertimento” written on the autograph score is not even in Mozart’s own hand. It may have well been composed for an important public event, since the scoring calls for four horns, not standard serenade personnel, and Mozart’s writing for them is highly demanding. (Salzburg boasted a very fine horn player, Ignaz Leutgeb, for whom Mozart later wrote his well-known concertos; it is likely he played the first horn part in this work.) The score is a loose collection of six movements. Like many of Mozart’s earliest Salzburg
entertainments, it doesn’t have the architectural unity of the later symphonies.