Symphony # 41 Theme (Jupiter): A Song History
Mozart completed his Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, on 10 August 1788, the last of three symphonies he had started that June and finished in under two months.[1] Its companions are No. 39 in E-flat major and No. 40 in G minor, and Mozart spent part of that summer in Vienna's Alsergrund suburb, where, by his own account, ten days brought more work than two months elsewhere.[2] As far as is known, nobody commissioned the three works.[3][4] Their purpose is uncertain: one program note ties them to planned concerts at a new casino on Vienna's Spiegelgasse, another to a London trip that never took place, and the sources consulted here give no date for a first performance.[2][4]
Jakob Matthias Schmutzer, IVe Vue du Parc de Neu-Waldeck prise du Pavillon Chinois vers le Nord, engraving, 1782. A park outside Vienna engraved in 1782, six years before Mozart wrote the symphony there; the engraving has no connection to it.
The nickname is not Mozart's.[4] In the usual account, drawn from the diary of the British publisher Vincent Novello, Mozart's son Franz Xaver credited the London violinist and concert promoter Johann Peter Salomon with naming the work after the king of the gods.[5][6][2] Novello also noted the son's verdict that the finale was "the highest triumph of instrumental composition."[5] German-speaking audiences long knew the piece instead as the symphony with the fugal ending.[1] That finale is built from a four-note opening figure, C–D–F–E, taken from an old church tune, together with four further themes.[4][1] The same figure appears as an exercise in Johann Joseph Fux's counterpoint treatise Gradus ad Parnassum.[3] In the coda Mozart sets all five themes going at once in counterpoint, closing with brass and timpani.[1][2]
On the dulcimer, Shelley Stevens arranges "Symphony # 41 Theme (Jupiter)" in DAD tuning in Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel book of solo pieces whose listing does not say which movement the theme comes from.[7]
Sources
- Boston Baroque: "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony No. 41" program note by Martin Pearlman.
- Berliner Philharmoniker: "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551 Jupiter" programme notes by Harald Hodeige.
- Brussels Philharmonic: "Mozart: Jupiter" programme notes by Jasper Croonen.
- Los Angeles Philharmonic (Hollywood Bowl): "Symphony No. 41 in C Major, 'Jupiter'" program note by Orrin Howard.
- Cambridge University Press: Elaine R. Sisman, Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony, "Preface".
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: "Notes on the Program" by Noel Morris.
- Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Jakob Matthias Schmutzer, IVe Vue du Parc de Neu-Waldeck prise du Pavillon Chinois vers le Nord, engraving, 1782. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.