Symphony No. 25 (Mozart)

• 1. The Little G Minor

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  Mozart's Symphony No. 25 in G minor was completed on the 5th of October 1773. That date came just two days after Mozart had finished his Symphony No. 24. He was 17 years old. The success of his opera Lucio Silla was still fresh. Something about that particular moment pushed him toward an intensity of sound that listeners and musicians have noticed ever since. They call this work the 'little G minor symphony,' to distinguish it from Mozart's later Symphony No. 40, the 'great G minor.' A performance runs about 20 minutes. How did a teenager in Salzburg produce something with this kind of staying power? And what accounts for the way it keeps surfacing in unexpected places more than 250 years later?

• 2. Storm and Stress

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  Wide-leaping melodic lines and syncopation are the hallmarks of Sturm und Drang, the artistic movement whose name translates as 'storm and stress.' Mozart's 25th symphony sits squarely within it. The style was circulating through European orchestral music in the early 1770s. It carried a recognizable intensity that distinguished it from more settled writing of the era.

  Haydn's Symphony No. 39 is the work scholars point to as a likely inspiration for the 25th. Like Mozart's, it is written in G minor, and both are characteristic examples of the Sturm und Drang style. Two oboes, two bassoons, four horns and strings form the ensemble Mozart called for. The symphony follows standard classical form across four movements: Allegro con brio, Andante, Menuetto and Trio, and a closing Allegro.

  The symphony would wait more than a century before receiving its first American performance.

• 3. American Premieres

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  On the 27th of October 1899, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the Symphony No. 25 its first American performance. Wilhelm Gericke conducted that evening. More than a century had elapsed since Mozart completed the score. After the 1899 concert, the work disappeared from American stages entirely.

  Nearly four decades passed before it was heard again in the country. In 1937, the Alfred Wallenstein Sinfonietta revived it. Four years later, in 1941, John Barbirolli led the New York Philharmonic in the symphony as part of that orchestra's centennial season. Thirty-eight years separated the Boston premiere from the 1937 revival.

  In 1990, Deutsche Grammophon released a recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Six years before that recording appeared, the symphony's opening movement had reached a far larger audience by a completely different route.

• 4. Cinema and Commerce

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  Milos Forman's 1984 biographical film Amadeus opens with the first movement of Symphony No. 25, before any of the drama begins. The recording heard in the film was made by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner. Amadeus was an Academy Award winner, and its success carried the symphony to cinema audiences who might never have attended a concert hall.

  The 1990s brought a different kind of audience. Titan, an Indian manufacturer of fashion accessories, selected a phrase from the Allegro con brio movement as theme music for its Quartz watch line. The company ran this through a series of television advertisements produced by the agency Ogilvy & Mather. Those advertisements became widely recognized across India and helped establish Titan as a familiar brand. Several different versions of the music were produced. One arranged the phrase for solo piano. Another built an electronic backing track and laid the melody on top, played on Indian instruments. That version featured Ravi Shankar on the sitar.

  Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain, who played tabla in that same version, were a celebrated father-and-son pair in Indian classical music. The phrase they played was drawn from the Allegro con brio, written for two oboes, two bassoons, four horns and strings.