Classical Period

Beethoven’s “King Stephen” Overture: A Hungarian Celebration

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In 1811, Beethoven received a commission to compose incidental music for two Hungarian-themed plays by August von Kotzebue, King Stephen and The Ruins of Athens. The plays were written to commemorate the opening of a magnificent new theater in the Hungarian city of Pest on the banks of the Danube (now the eastern part of unified Budapest). The theater’s construction was funded by Franz I, the last Holy Roman Emperor and the …

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Mozart’s “Il Re Pastore”: Excerpts from a Youthful Opera

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Mozart’s two-act opera, Il re pastore (“The Shepherd King”), K. 208, written to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, tells a fanciful story in which love and faithfulness triumph over ambition. The following brief synopsis is provided by Opera Online: Alessandro, king of Macedonia (soprano), having just conquered the city of Sidon, wants it to be ruled by Aminta (soprano), the young legitimate heir who became a shepherd after he was removed from the throne …

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Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major: David Oistrakh in Concert in 1968

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Mozart’s earliest childhood performances as a violinist were recounted humorously by Johann Andreas Schachtner. In a 1792 letter to Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna, or “Nannerl,” Schachtner, a close friend of the family, recalled an occasion when he was invited to play second violin for an informal chamber music session at the Mozart house. Little Wolfgang asked to be allowed to play second violin. As he hadn’t had any lessons yet, your Papa …

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Schubert’s Third Symphony: Effortless Music from a Miraculous Year

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1815 has been called Franz Schubert’s “miracle year.” In those twelve months, while working as a full-time schoolteacher, the 18-year-old composer wrote more than 20,000 bars of music. Among other works, he completed two symphonies (Nos. 2 and 3), two masses, a string quartet, two piano sonatas, and 145 songs (including the famous Erlkönig). Schubert’s biweekly composition lessons with Antonio Salieri during this period remind us that, even for the most intuitive …

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Beethoven’s Mass in C Major: Gentleness, Cheerfulness, and Humanity

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Completed in 1807, Beethoven’s Mass in C Major came seventeen years before the premiere of the monumental Missa solemnis. In its way, it is a work which is equally mould-shattering. Beethoven, who seldom attended church, considered music to be “the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life…the one spiritual entrance into the higher world.” His Mass in C Major moves away from dogma to embrace the free, all-encompassing sanctity of the individual. A serene, …

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Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 in C Major, “Il Distratto”: Music for the Comic Stage

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Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 in C Major, Il Distratto, (“The Absent-Minded Gentleman”) has been called “the funniest piece of symphonic music ever written.” (Kenneth Woods) The six-movement Symphony was conceived originally as incidental music for a 1774 German-language adaptation of Le Distrait, a farcical comedy by the French playwright, Jean François Regnard. The play centers around the buffoonish misadventures of a man who is so absent-minded that he nearly forgets …

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Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 in C Major, “Linz”: A Hurriedly Written Masterpiece

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In 1783, Mozart traveled to Salzburg with his new bride, Constanze, in an attempt to reconcile with his father, who did not approve of the marriage. On the return trip to Vienna, the couple spent three weeks in the Upper Austrian town of Linz as guests of Count Johann Thun-Hohenstein, an old friend of the Mozart family. In a letter dated October 31, Mozart wrote to his father, When we reached the …

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