How many dances did Mozart compose?
About 200 dances by Mozart are still preserved. The modern critical edition of his dances, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, runs to approximately 300 pages of score.
Questions about Mozart and dance
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What was Mozart's official role composing dance music for the Habsburg court?
On the 7th of December 1787, Mozart was appointed Royal and Imperial Chamber Composer for Emperor Joseph II. His main duty in this largely ceremonial post was to compose dances for the balls held at the Redoutensälen, the public ballrooms of the Imperial Palace in Vienna.
What three genres of dance did Mozart write?
Mozart's dances fall into three primary genres: the minuet, an elegant aristocratic dance written in ternary form; the German Dance (Deutscher Tanz), a livelier form with working-class origins; and the contredanse, descended from English country dance and popular across all social classes.
Was Mozart himself a skilled dancer?
Yes. His biographer Nissen recorded that Mozart "passionately loved dancing" and "danced very well indeed, particularly the minuet." His friend the tenor Michael Kelly wrote that Mozart "was an enthusiast in dancing, and often said that his taste lay in that art, rather than in music."
How did dance music appear in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni?
In the first act of Don Giovanni (1787), three dances play simultaneously in interlocking rhythms at a party scene. The social class of each character was matched to the traditional class associations of their assigned dance: the nobility dance a minuet, the peasant girl Zerlina a contradanse, and the servant Leporello a German Dance.
How quickly could Mozart compose dance music?
Mozart could compose dances with exceptional speed. During a visit to Prague in early 1787, he wrote nine dances for full orchestra in full score within the span of an hour. On a separate occasion, his biographer Nissen recorded that Mozart composed four fully orchestrated contredanses in less than half an hour.