Mozart and dance

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mozart and dance are inseparable, not just because Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote roughly 200 dances that survive to this day, but because he loved dancing with a passion his friends and biographers could not ignore. The tenor Michael Kelly, who knew Mozart personally, wrote in his Reminiscences that Mozart "was an enthusiast in dancing, and often said that his taste lay in that art, rather than in music." That a composer of his stature would say such a thing is startling. It raises a question worth dwelling on: what does it mean to understand a composer who wrote minuets, contredanses, and German dances not as a professional obligation, but as a genuine joy? The story of Mozart and dance runs from a five-year-old boy dancing in a Latin school play in Salzburg, through a royal appointment at the court of Emperor Joseph II, to a crowded ball Mozart himself hosted in a borrowed set of rooms in Vienna, lasting from six in the evening until seven in the morning.

• 2. The Dancer Before the Composer

  ›

  Mozart's first appearance before a public audience was not as a keyboard prodigy. On the 1st and the 3rd of September 1761, five-year-old Wolfgang danced in a Latin play called "Sigismundus Rex" in Salzburg, staged to mark the end of the academic year. His career as an instrumental performer in public began only a few months after that. By the time he was 14, writing to his sister Nannerl from Italy in 1770, he described his main amusement as practicing "English contredanse steps, and Capriol and spaccat." These were not idle pastimes. His biographer Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, drawing on the testimony of Mozart's wife Constanze, wrote that the adult Mozart "passionately loved dancing, and missed neither the public masked balls in the theatre, nor his friends' domestic balls. And he danced very well indeed, particularly the minuet." Mozart's standards for a dance partner were high. On the 6th of October 1777 he wrote to his father Leopold from Munich to report that at a dance, he had joined only four minuets because among all the girls present, only one, Mademoiselle Käser, could dance in time with the beat. The Mozart family home also reflected this devotion. In 1773, Leopold moved the family from their lodgings in the Getreidegasse to larger quarters in what was known as the Dancing Master's House, a space that included a sizable hall the Mozarts used for dances, concerts, and other gatherings.

• 3. Imperial Dances, Imperial Duty

  ›

  On the 7th of December 1787, Mozart was appointed Royal and Imperial Chamber Composer for Emperor Joseph II. The post was largely ceremonial, but it came with a specific and recurring obligation: to compose dances for the balls held at the Redoutensälen, the public ballrooms inside the Imperial Palace in Vienna. Mozart met this duty with remarkable consistency. He generally composed dances each year between late December and early March, following the schedule of the imperial balls, which according to the scholar Abert were held "every Sunday during the carnival season, as well as on the last Thursday before Lent and on the last three days of the carnival." Dances survive from 1788, 1789, and 1791. None date from 1790, because Emperor Joseph II fell ill and died on the 20th of February that year. Mozart himself offered a wry assessment of this position. He once remarked that his pay as imperial chamber composer was "too much for what I do, too little for what I could do." According to Solomon, the income from these officially commissioned dances helped Mozart recover from the financial distress that had beset him in the later 1780s.

• 4. Three Genres, Three Classes

  ›

  Mozart's dance output sorted itself into three distinct genres, each carrying its own social weight. The minuet was the most refined: aristocratic in origin, elegant and stately, and by Mozart's time already slightly old-fashioned. Mozart wrote his minuets in ternary form, meaning the minuet itself came first, followed by a contrasting trio section, then a return of the minuet. At the other end of the social scale stood the German Dance, known in German as the Deutscher Tanz. It came from the lower classes, was far livelier than the minuet, and bore some resemblance to the waltz. The close physical contact it required, combined with the constant spinning that left dancers dizzy, led some observers to condemn it as immoral. It was danced widely regardless. Between these two was the contredanse, a form descended from English country dance, which was rich in individual figures and enjoyed across all social classes. Mozart sometimes worked popular melodies into his contredanses: K. 609, for instance, quotes the aria "Non più andrai" from his own opera The Marriage of Figaro. Of these three genres, minuets dominate Mozart's early career, with the German Dance and contredanse coming to the fore in his later years.

• 5. Speed and Invention

  ›

  Mozart composed dances at a pace that impressed even those who watched him work. His biographer Nissen recorded an episode from Mozart's visit to Prague in early 1787. Count Johann Pachta had been promised a set of contredanses, but Mozart had not produced them. The count summoned him to his home an hour before a meal, gave him writing materials, and told him to write the dances then and there, since they were to be performed that same day. By the time the meal began, nine dances for full orchestra had been written out in full score. Nissen also recalled a separate occasion on which Mozart composed four fully orchestrated contredanses in less than half an hour. The scholar Flothuis observed that Mozart's dances are generally written in strict eight- and sixteen-bar phrases, which reflected their functional purpose. Yet critics have noticed that within these tight constraints, monotony is almost entirely absent. Abert wrote that "the most striking aspect of these dances is their almost literally inexhaustible fund of invention. Although their form offers only limited scope for experimentation, each dance differs from the others." The modern critical edition of Mozart's dances, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, runs to about 300 pages of score.

• 6. Dance Embedded in Opera

  ›

  Mozart did not keep dance separate from his larger dramatic works. His opera Idomeneo, which premiered in 1781, includes a substantial ballet at the end; unusually for the period, Mozart wrote the ballet music himself rather than delegating it to another composer, going against the standard practice of his time. The Marriage of Figaro, from 1786, contains a pivotal dance scene in which the character Susanna passes a feigned love note to Count Almaviva while a fandango plays. The theatrical management at the premiere resisted this scene. Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte had to argue for it with some difficulty before it was allowed to remain. The most architecturally complex dance scene Mozart ever conceived appears in Don Giovanni, which opened in 1787. In the first act, three dances play simultaneously, each in its own interlocking rhythm. As Lindmayr-Brandl described the design: the social class of each character was matched to the traditional class of his or her assigned dance. Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, Don Ottavio, and Don Giovanni dance a minuet; Don Giovanni then invites the peasant girl Zerlina to a contradanse; and the servant Leporello dances a German Dance with the peasant Masetto.

• 7. The Man Who Hosted Until Dawn

  ›

  In January 1783, Mozart was living in Vienna with his wife Constanze in three cramped rooms. He hosted a ball anyway. In a letter dated the 22nd of January 1783, he wrote to his father Leopold that the ball ran from six in the evening and stopped "at 7 - what? only an hour? - no, no - at seven in the morning." He arranged access to large empty rooms adjacent to their apartment. The young men who attended each paid two florins. Johann Anton André, who from 1798 became an important posthumous publisher of Mozart's manuscripts, left a separate account from when he was 16 and Mozart was 34. Mozart stopped at the André house in Offenbach during a troubled concert tour of southern Germany in 1790. André later wrote that no sooner had Mozart stepped down from his coach than dance music attracted his attention: the workers at the firm had been given permission to hold a dance. Mozart joined them immediately, chose the prettiest girl present, and danced with her for a long time. Lindmayr-Brandl, writing in 2006, described Mozart's surviving dances as "a precious treasure, the immediate expression of the joy of life." That phrase points toward something the music itself keeps suggesting: that for Mozart, the dance was never merely an assignment.