Mozart: Serenade No. 10 for winds in B-flat major, K. 361, "Gran Partita"
Largely driven by the demand of the lesser nobility, the latter part of the 18th century saw a utilitarian flowering of music for wind ensembles, known as Harmoniemusik. In addition to being more financially accessible to the middle-aristocracy than a full orchestra, Harmoniemusik also offered the flexibility of being suitable for both indoor and outdoor performance, and thus functioned well for entertaining as well as for the curious but popular custom of wooing a lover by hiring musicians to perform outside her window. While its two minuets and boisterous finale do bespeak the work’s dialogue with a tradition of music for outdoorsy entertainment, Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 for winds in B-flat major, K. 361, "Gran Partita" represents an unprecedented inflation of the scale and scope of Harmoniemusik. The nearly 50-minute piece for 13 instruments dwarfs the modest proportions of the genre’s earlier, lighter works, and even exceeds the length and ensemble size of Mozart’s other two great Viennese wind serenades in E-flat and C minor. Moreover, the Gran Partita achieves in its seven movements — particularly in the miraculous Adagio — an emotional profundity and compositional sincerity previously foreign to wind ensemble music. Although the Serenade is best known today by its colloquial name, the misspelled subtitle “Gran Partita” was actually added to the autograph by an unknown hand other than Mozart’s sometime after he finished the piece. The work is shrouded in further uncertainty regarding its date of composition and the occasion of its premiere; some scholars have posited that the piece was first performed at Mozart’s own wedding in 1782, while more recent evidence suggests Mozart composed the Serenade for a 1784 benefit concert for the clarinetist Anton Stadler. With his addition of a pair of basset horns, two extra French horns and a string bass (sometimes doubled by or substituted for a contrabassoon) to the traditional wind octet, Mozart fashioned a textural palate of orchestral proportions, whose impressive depth announces itself from the first gleaming chord.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
Largely driven by the demand of the lesser nobility, the latter part of the 18th century saw a utilitarian flowering of music for wind ensembles, known as Harmoniemusik. In addition to being more financially accessible to the middle-aristocracy than a full orchestra, Harmoniemusik also offered the flexibility of being suitable for both indoor and outdoor performance, and thus functioned well for entertaining as well as for the curious but popular custom of wooing a lover by hiring musicians to perform outside her window. While its two minuets and boisterous finale do bespeak the work’s dialogue with a tradition of music for outdoorsy entertainment, Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 for winds in B-flat major, K. 361, "Gran Partita" represents an unprecedented inflation of the scale and scope of Harmoniemusik. The nearly 50-minute piece for 13 instruments dwarfs the modest proportions of the genre’s earlier, lighter works, and even exceeds the length and ensemble size of Mozart’s other two great Viennese wind serenades in E-flat and C minor. Moreover, the Gran Partita achieves in its seven movements — particularly in the miraculous Adagio — an emotional profundity and compositional sincerity previously foreign to wind ensemble music. Although the Serenade is best known today by its colloquial name, the misspelled subtitle “Gran Partita” was actually added to the autograph by an unknown hand other than Mozart’s sometime after he finished the piece. The work is shrouded in further uncertainty regarding its date of composition and the occasion of its premiere; some scholars have posited that the piece was first performed at Mozart’s own wedding in 1782, while more recent evidence suggests Mozart composed the Serenade for a 1784 benefit concert for the clarinetist Anton Stadler. With his addition of a pair of basset horns, two extra French horns and a string bass (sometimes doubled by or substituted for a contrabassoon) to the traditional wind octet, Mozart fashioned a textural palate of orchestral proportions, whose impressive depth announces itself from the first gleaming chord.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest