Head-to-Head in 1788

Violin I

Rachel Pietkiewicz, Acting Concertmaster
Sharon Bartley
Shayna Burt
David Engel
Kirsten Dalboe

Violin II

Seiichi Takedai, Acting Principal
Sarah Brittman
Wendy Chun
Richard Hong
Sachi Rosenbaum

Viola

Michael Garrahan, Principal
Stephen Fisher
Ayocuan Pacheco

Cello

Philip Hopko, Principal
Stephanie Herman
Ethan Butler
Edwina Moldover

Bass

Nathan Coughlin, Guest Principal

Flute

Eric Abalahin

Oboe

Jane Hughes
Leslie Jewell

Bassoon

Katrien van Dijk
Bill Jokela
Walter Wynn

Horn

Jim McIntyre
Zachary Miller

Trumpet

Chris Erbe
Bruce Stanly

Timpani

James Adams

Stage Managers

Katrien van Dijk
Edwina Moldover

While most of the best-known of Haydn’s last symphonies come from his three commissioned series of works, the “Paris” symphonies, numbered 82 to 87, and the two sets of “London” symphonies, numbered 93 to 98 and 99 to 104,nevertheless two of his most popular, the G-major symphony, No. 88, and the “Oxford” symphony, No. 92, come from the years between these. The three remaining works of this period, numbered 89, 90, and 91, are rarely heard. My intent in performing the little-known C-major symphony No. 90 came from the desire both to give our audience another taste of the composer’s diversity and genius and to confront it with the last and arguably the greatest of Mozart’s symphonies, the so-called “Jupiter Symphony”, written in the same year, 1788.

In its first movement, Haydn’s Symphony No. 90 is strikingly reminiscent of the powerful C-major symphony No. 82, known as “The Bear,” due to the heavy-footed drone basses underlying much of its finale. While “The Bear” begins in media res with a powerful unison, tonight’s symphony begins with a slow introduction, ubiquitous in the composer’s later symphonies, whose thematic connection to the main body of the movement is unmistakable. The two symphonies’ slow movements have the same form, a set of variations on a simple, symmetrical melody, alternating between F major and F minor, the latter with an almost Beethovenian ferocity. The slow movement of No. 90, however, looks back at Haydn’s life-long affection for concertante display of solo instruments; here bassoon, flute, principal bass and principal ‘cello each have their moment. Moreover, the extended oboe solo in the Trio of the Menuet has been ornamented by our player, following the tradition of the time. I find the madcap finale a splendid bridge between Haydn’s almost-reflexive boisterous contradances of so many earlier symphonies and the more texturally intricate and tonally wide-raging concluding movements of his following symphonies.

***

For many years a sentimental haze colored perception of Mozart’s last three symphonies. The composer himself dated the manuscripts; the E-flat symphony, K. 543, the first version of the G- minor symphony (without clarinets), K. 550 and the “Jupiter” Symphony, K. 551, were completed between June 26 and August 10, 1788. Their early performance history was unknown, leading to the conviction that they were written with superhuman speed from some powerful inner artistic impulse rather than out of economic necessity.

In a 1993 monograph on the “Jupiter” Symphony, Elaine Sisman remarked that “[r]ecent scholars have distanced themselves from the earlier widely-held view that Mozart never heard his last symphonies, a romanticized picture of the starving, suffering artist denied the fulfillment of having his finest instrumental creations performed in his presence.”

Modern scholarship has shown that Mozart rarely if ever wrote except with specific concerts in mind, for a particular patron or performer, or with the promise of publication. In fact, when such opportunities vanished, he did not hesitate to abandon partially-completed works. Most important, research of the past half-century has identified several occasions for which the composer might well have composed this extraordinary symphonic triptych.

As far back as the bicentennial year 1956, H. C. Robbins Landon, who edited the last symphonies for the New Mozart Edition, suggested that they were written for a series of projected concerts in Vienna to which Mozart refers in a letter of June 1788. Although little further documentation of these concerts has surfaced, Landon has argued persistently, and in the eyes of many colleagues, convincingly, that they did indeed take place.

In his magisterial 1989 survey of the symphonies, Neal Zaslaw suggests two other possible goals for the last three symphonies. First, he suggests that Mozart had in mind their publication as a single “opus,” as in the music trade of that era quartets, sonatas and symphonies were typically offered to the public in sets of three, six or even twelve. Although in fact unpublished until shortly after Mozart’s death, and then only as individual works, the last symphonies circulated in manuscript form during the remaining three years of his life, suggesting that they were performed, at least outside Vienna, during his lifetime.

Second, and even more fascinating, he postulates that they might have been written for a possible visit to London, to be arranged with the aid of British friends, and that when that project fell through, they were used for a German tour in 1789, during which Mozart gave concerts, seeking both patronage and a permanent position. It is highly likely that the G-minor symphony was revised to include clarinets for a Vienna concert in April 1791; we know that Mozart’s clarinettist friends, the brothers Johann and Anton Stadler were in the orchestra. This concert was directed by none other than Antonio Salieri (1750-1825), whom many modern music-lovers assume to have been Mozart’s nemesis. and possibly his assassin, due to Peter Schaffer’s characterization in the 1979 play Amadeus, subsequently filmed by Milos Forman in 1984.

The latest word on the subject appears in a fascinating study published in 2012, Christoph Wolff’s Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune: Serving the Emperor, 1788–1791. The title itself comes from a letter of 1790 in which Mozart anticipates a fruitful and profitable future in a distinguished position at the Imperial Court of Austria. Wolff examines the late works and correspondence, starting with the last three symphonies and convincingly argues for a consistent ‘imperial style’ aimed in part at the musical tastes of Emperor Joseph II, an informed and enthusiastic patron of the arts, whose portrait in Amadeus is, like that of Salieri, more comedic caricature than a representation of reality.

“[W]hat emerged…is a remarkable mature steadiness in finding a balance between past musical experiences and a deliberate, often daring exploration of new ways, including those that move in such disparate directions as simplified melodic contours…sophisticated chromaticism, dissonant counterpoint, and emotionally charged musical rhetoric that began with the creation of three grand symphonies…” These works “…define the meaning of imperial style…:innovative, ambitious, expansive, complex, technically sophisticated, conceptually erudite though on the surface simple and elegant, and aesthetically compelling throughout.” Wolff goes on to note large-scale parallelisms between the last three Mozart symphonies and the first three of Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies, which had just been published, and most probably served as some sort of stimulus and prototype, as well as the extent to which Mozart’s symphonic trilogy expands upon the temporal and dramatic dimensions of Haydn’s.

With these factors in mind we can appreciate the special nature of the “Jupiter” symphony. Although most famous for Mozart’s spectacular fusion of sonata-allegro form and contrapuntal procedure in its finale, the other movements have many unexpected contrapuntal episodes as well, the harmonic vocabulary is pervasively chromatic, although often it often supports diatonic thematic material, and the orchestral palette is generously scaled, offering both broad gestures and intimately-scaled episodes.

The sobriquet “Jupiter” is not Mozart’s but seems to have appeared shortly after his death; it is credited to the violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon (1745–1815), best known for having invited Haydn to London in the 1790s. It first appears in print on a London edition of 1823, hence it must have been in circulation for some years beforehand. German writers have often referred to it as “Sinfonie mit der Schlußfuge” (“…with the fugal finale”) which is not quite correct, although a five-voice permutation-fugue appears early in the coda of the last movement.

From a historical perspective, perhaps the most important aspect of the “Jupiter” is that due to the compositional density and dramatic weight of its finale, the entire symphony anticipates the shape of “teleological” works of the next generation, such as Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies (Sisman); to which I would add resonances in the monumental finale of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony (1876) in which the composer amalgamates sonata-allegro structure, fugal procedure and chorale-prelude textures, and as well in the triumphant last movement of Brahms’ First Symphony (also 1876), where contrapuntal episodes paraphrase material from the finale of the “Jupiter”. Like Bruckner’s finale, it too ends with a chorale-based apotheosis.

Notes by Joel Lazar © 2025

Now in his eighteenth season with the Washington Sinfonietta,  acclaimed by the Washington Post as “…one of Washington’s premier conductors of both old and new music…”, Joel Lazar was Music Director of the JCC Symphony Orchestra from 1988 through 2008 and has continued with that orchestra in its new identity as the Symphony of the Potomac. He conducted the Theater Chamber Players in engagements at the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress and on tour from 1986 to 2003, and has appeared as guest conductor with many orchestras and contemporary music ensembles in the Washington area. [read more]

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