Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: A Song History
Eine kleine Nachtmusik is the familiar name of Mozart's Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525, scored for two violins, viola, cello and double bass and completed on 10 August 1787, during the Vienna years that filled the last decade of his life.[1] The title is the phrase Mozart used when he entered the work in his catalogue of compositions, and "kleine" refers to its brevity: serenades of the day often ran to seven or eight movements.[2] Viennese serenades were often written for winds, so this all-string work was unusual, and the occasion for which it was composed has never been identified.[2][1]
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delafosse, Leopold Mozart and His Children Maria Anna and Wolfgang Giving a Concert in Paris, etching and engraving, 1764. Shows Mozart as a child, with his father and sister, years before this piece.
As it survives, the serenade has four movements: an allegro in sonata form, a lyrical slow movement, a minuet, and a quick rondo finale; a second minuet that once belonged to it is lost.[1] It was not printed in Mozart's lifetime, and the first edition appeared decades after his death.[1][2] In 1799 his widow Constanze sold the work to a publisher as part of a large lot of his music; the buyer of that collection of more than 270 autograph manuscripts was Johann Anton André of Offenbach, whose firm issued the serenade's first edition.[2][3]
Today the serenade is usually played in orchestral arrangement and ranks among the most frequently performed of all classical works; it even figured in the 1984 film Amadeus.[1] Larry Conger includes it in The Classical Dulcimer, a collection of nearly thirty classical arrangements for mountain dulcimer, most in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]
Sources
- Britannica: "Eine kleine Nachtmusik".
- Princeton Symphony Orchestra: "Mozart, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525" (program notes).
- Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Offenbach am Main: "Johann Anton André (1775-1842) and the Mozart estate".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, The Classical Dulcimer".
- Image: Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delafosse, Leopold Mozart and His Children Maria Anna and Wolfgang Giving a Concert in Paris, etching and engraving, 1764. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.