Eine kleine Nachtmusik

• 1. Introduction

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  Eine kleine Nachtmusik is a serenade Mozart entered in his own personal catalogue on the 10th of August 1787, simply noting that he had finished a little serenade. No grand title was intended. No occasion was recorded. No first performance is known. What survives is a piece in G major bearing the catalogue number K. 525, and a mystery that musicologists have never fully solved: why did Mozart write it, and for whom?

  The German phrase literally means "a little night music", and Mozart gave it no special distinction in his records. He was in the middle of composing the second act of Don Giovanni at the time. The serenade sat unpublished for over thirty years after his death. And yet, by any measure of how often a piece of classical music is performed and recorded, this quickly jotted occasional work has become one of the most recognized pieces Mozart ever wrote. What the piece contains, what it may once have contained, and how it found its way to every concert hall in the world is the story worth telling.

• 2. Vienna, August 1787

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  On the 10th of August 1787, Mozart was deep in Vienna completing work on Don Giovanni, one of his most ambitious operas. He paused to finish a chamber piece and record it in the personal catalogue he kept of his own compositions. The entry reads: Eine kleine Nacht-Musick. No commissioner is named, no patron identified, no performance occasion mentioned.

  Wolfgang Hildesheimer, noting that Mozart's serenades were in most cases written on commission, has suggested this one was no different. A commission, he reasoned, whose origin and first performance simply went unrecorded. Mozart's widow Constanze later sold the manuscript to the publisher Johann Andre in Offenbach am Main as part of a large bundle of her husband's works. That transaction placed the piece in print for the first time around 1827, more than thirty years after Mozart died. Zaslaw and Cowdery have made the further point that Mozart, in writing that catalogue entry, was probably not naming the piece at all. He was simply noting what kind of thing he had just finished.

• 3. Four Movements, Four Characters

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  The serenade is written for two violins, a viola, a cello, and a double bass, though string orchestras frequently perform it. What exists today is four movements, each with a distinct character drawn from different formal traditions.

  The opening Allegro launches with what is known as a Mannheim rocket, a theme built on a rapidly ascending figure. The movement follows sonata-allegro form, with a second theme in D major, the dominant key, followed by a development that moves through D minor and C major before returning home. The Romance that follows, marked Andante and set in C major, works in rondo form, cycling through an A-B-A-C-A structure plus a final coda. Musicologist Daniel Heartz describes it as evoking a gavotte rhythm because each section begins in the middle of the measure with a double upbeat. The Menuetto comes next, a minuet and trio in which the minuet holds to G major and the trio shifts to D major, the dominant. The minuet returns da capo after the trio, as convention required. The Rondo finale, again in G major and marked Allegro, is unusual in that Mozart calls for repeats not just of the exposition but of the development and recapitulation sections as well. The recapitulation's first theme is further distinguished by returning only in its last two bars, and in the parallel minor.

• 4. The Lost Movement

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  Mozart's own catalogue entry listed the work as having five movements: Allegro, Minuet and Trio, Romance, Minuet and Trio, Finale. Only four survive. The second movement in that sequence, a minuet and trio, has long been considered lost, and musicologist Alfred Einstein wrote that he did not know who removed it.

  Einstein proposed a candidate: a minuet found in the Piano Sonata in B major, K. 498a, a work attributed to the composer August Eberhard Muller. K. 498a incorporates substantial material derived from Mozart's own piano concertos, specifically K. 450, K. 456, and K. 595, which led Einstein to suggest the minuet might be Muller's arrangement of the missing movement. He acknowledged the evidence was limited. In 1971, Thurston Dart, a musicologist and performer, recorded a version of the serenade that incorporated this candidate movement. Then in his 1984 recording, Christopher Hogwood took a different approach: he substituted a minuet drawn from the sketchbooks of Thomas Attwood, a pupil who had studied directly under Mozart, and added a newly composed trio to accompany it. Jonathan Del Mar returned to the K. 498a minuet and trio for an arrangement he made for Nimbus Records in 1989. No consensus has formed around any of these solutions.

• 5. An Occasional Piece, Everywhere

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  Hildesheimer, writing on Mozart's works, called Eine kleine Nachtmusik the most popular of all of them. His words are precise: "even if we hear it on every street corner, its high quality is undisputed, an occasional piece from a light but happy pen." Britannica has described it as among the most frequently performed and iconic of all classical compositions.

  The piece has also drawn interest beyond the concert hall. It has appeared in scientific studies examining the effect of music on fish as well as on humans. That an unpublished occasional piece, entered without ceremony into a private catalogue in the summer of 1787, could accumulate that kind of reach across two and a half centuries is a fact the source of the piece does nothing to explain. Mozart left no account of it. The commission, if there was one, left no trace. What remains is the music itself and the open question of what the complete five-movement version, with its missing minuet and trio, once sounded like.