Mozart, WA :: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K525

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' K525 for flute and piano is arranged here by Charles Peter Lynch.

First the title, as familiar as the music itself. It is best known in English as A Little Night Music , the name Stephen Sondheim took for his Broadway adaptation of Ingmar Bergman s Mozartean comic film, Smiles of a Summer Night . Mozart didn t mean it as a lovely, evocative phrase it was simply a convenient designation for an untitled work that he entered in his catalog as soon as it was finished, on August 10, 1787. The words literally mean a short serenade (Nachtmusik being the German equivalent of notturno, the common Italian designation). (In the same way, he would enter eine kleine Klavier Sonata and eine kleine Marsch the following year.) Serenades are occasional works party music for important social events. They were meant to be insignificant and disposable it was assumed that a serenade, like a great deal of music in the eighteenth century, would be performed only once conditions that Mozart, for all his talents, could not fulfill. Mozart wrote many serenades for various combinations of instruments, particularly in his early days in Salzburg, and we wouldn t want to be without any of them, for they find him at his most relaxed, and, at the same time, endlessly inventive. Like a major novelist who enjoys writing lighter works on the side, Mozart seemed to relish the challenge of making something first-rate of a second-class genre. He wrote fewer serenades once he moved to Vienna in 1781, especially as he grew more interested in symphonic form. Eine kleine Nachtmusik was his last serenade, and the only one he wrote for strings alone. Ironically, little is known about this work perhaps the most popular and familiar of all Mozart s compositions. There s no record of who asked Mozart to write it, or for what kind of occasion it was intended. Mozart doesn t mention it in his correspondence, and if it weren t for its near perfection as a work of art, we might suspect that he gave it little thought that for once, he really tossed off some music to be played in someone s garden and then forgotten. But Eine kleine Nachtmusik is one of Mozart s leanest and most brilliant creations a score of truly crystalline precision. It is written with painstaking care and concern, and with an impatience for the commonplace phrase or harmonic progression that arises only when a composer is fully engaged in his work. Mozart was busy with the second act of Don Giovanni when he took time out for this serenade; perhaps his almost fierce dedication to that score one of his most adventuresome works quite naturally spilled over into this little string serenade. We know only that the work was written sometime during the summer of 1787, shortly after his father s death. Mozart listed it in his catalog on August 10 just two entries and three months before Don Giovanni indexing not just the four movements we now know, but also an additional minuet and trio after the opening Allegro. This fifth movement has not survived. Of the four that have, each could stand as a textbook example not only of technical mastery and formal clarity, but, more impressively, of how music apparently written by the rules demonstrates individuality and originality in phrase after phrase.

-Phillip Huscher, 2013