Toy Symphony: A Song History
The little three-movement piece known as the Toy Symphony, or Kindersinfonie, sets ordinary strings against so-called Berchtesgaden instruments, among them a cuckoo, a quail, a trumpet, a drum and a rattle, named for the Bavarian town near Salzburg where such toys were said to be made.[1] The string section has no violas, and the cuckoo and nightingale whistles are especially insistent.[2] By the early 1790s Vienna knew it as Joseph Haydn's: a 1791 benefit concert at the Theater auf der Wieden billed it under his name, and the copyist and dealer Johann Traeg advertised it the same way in 1792.[1] A Viennese lexicon of 1793 went further, claiming Haydn wrote it for Ursuline nuns and that Mozart once praised it, but the editors of Mozart: New Documents find no other trace of the convent link and are skeptical that Mozart ever commented on it that way.[1]
Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory, Pair of cuckoos, soft-paste porcelain, ca. 1750. A pair of porcelain cuckoos of about 1750, shown for the cuckoo whistle among the Toy Symphony's toy instruments; the figures have no connection to the music.
Who actually wrote it is still argued over, and copies have been credited to Michael Haydn and Leopold Mozart as well as to Joseph Haydn.[1] For a time a manuscript copy Leopold made in 1759 seemed to settle the matter in his favor, though he may simply have been copying the piece for himself, and he was a prolific copyist.[3][4] In 1996 Hildegard Herrmann-Schneider argued for Edmund Angerer, a Benedictine born in 1740 who directed the choir at Stift Fiecht in the Tyrol, and the Mozart: New Documents editors consider him the likeliest author.[1] RISM, the international inventory of music sources, has since described a modern premiere of the work as Angerer's, and a recent program note credits the latest research with finding at least four partial manuscript versions while still listing the composer as unknown.[5][2]
Whatever its origin, the piece has stayed a favorite of children's concerts, where the famous names still tend to appear on the program.[4] The third and last movement is its finale, and that is the part Shelley Stevens chose for Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel book that credits it to Leopold Mozart and, like every other piece in the collection, sets it in DAD tuning.[4][6]
Sources
- Mozart: New Documents (ed. Dexter Edge & David Black): "1793 Toy Symphony".
- Denver Philharmonic Orchestra (program note by Elizabeth Schwartz): "Leopold Mozart, maybe?".
- Interlude (Maureen Buja): "Music for Children: Austria and Hungary".
- Sin80: "Toy Symphony".
- RISM (Manfred Schneider): "Music from Stams Abbey (Austria)".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory, Pair of cuckoos, soft-paste porcelain, ca. 1750. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.