Mozart, WA :: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Musicians Publications presents W.A. Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik arranged for woodwind quintet by Carson Rothrock.

This arrangement is advanced in difficulty and 4:33 in duration.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik , perhaps the best-known and best-loved of all Mozart s works, remains one of the most mysterious. It comes from a year 1787 when little is known about Mozart s life, and no one is sure why Mozart suddenly wrote so gentle and charming a piece of music. The external events from that year are few: in May his father died in Salzburg, and Mozart himself was occupied for most of the remainder of the year with composing Don Giovanni ; during that year he may have met and given lessons to a sixteen-year-old visiting from Bonn named Ludwig van Beethoven, but the evidence is uncertain. All that we really know is that Mozart broke off work on the second act of Don Giovanni to write this serenade; the manuscript is dated August 10. Usually this sort of serenade was intended for a social occasion, but there is no record of such an event, and Mozart had written no string serenades since his days in Salzburg. Two centuries later, the origins of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik remain mysterious.

- Eric Bromberger