Symphony No. 31 (Mozart)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart's Symphony No. 31 in D major, known to history as the Paris Symphony, was composed in 1778 by a 22-year-old on a job hunt that was going nowhere. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had come to Paris hoping to find steady employment. He found no job, but he did find an unusually large orchestra, a discerning audience, and a director named Joseph Legros who was willing to commission a new work. What came out of that collision was a symphony unlike anything Mozart had written before. It would be performed again and again at the Concert Spirituel, described in a publisher's catalog as a staple of the repertoire for years, and would almost certainly become one of the first of his symphonies to appear in print. The questions worth asking are why this particular work broke through when so many others did not, what made Paris a crucible for something genuinely new in Mozart's writing, and why one of its movements had to be replaced before audiences would accept it.

• 2. Paris, a Job, and a Commission

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  Joseph Legros was both an opera singer and an impresario, and his role as director of the Concert Spirituel gave him real authority over what Parisian audiences heard. It was Legros who commissioned the new symphony from Mozart, giving the 22-year-old composer a concrete reason to write on a large scale. The Concert Spirituel was one of the most prestigious public concert series in Europe at the time, and a premiere there carried genuine weight. The private premiere took place on the 12th of June 1778, not in a concert hall but in the home of Count Karl Heinrich Joseph von Sickingen, who served as ambassador of the Electorate of the Palatinate. Six days after that private performance, the work received its public premiere at the Concert Spirituel itself. The Courrier de l'Europe, a London-based publication, reviewed the concert in its issue of June 26th, noting that Mozart had made a name for himself from the tenderest age among harpsichord players and could now be ranked among the most able composers. That review is one of the earliest surviving critical notices of Mozart in the French press.

• 3. The Mannheim Rocket and a Large Orchestra

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  Paris gave Mozart access to forces he had never commanded before. The orchestra available to him included two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets in A, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Sadie notes this was the largest orchestra for which Mozart had yet composed in his career up to that point. At the premiere, the string section alone comprised 22 violins, five violas, eight cellos, and five double basses. It was also the first time Mozart used clarinets in a symphony. The work opens with a gesture called the Mannheim Rocket, a rising and accelerating D major scale that was a recognizable stylistic signal to contemporary audiences. Sadie's assessment of the result is direct: he calls the symphony "quite noisy," with vigorous and stirring tuttis, a lively violin line, and an active bass line that gives the music extra animation. Leopold Mozart, the composer's father, drew his own conclusion from what he saw of the Parisian symphonies: the French, he judged, must like noisy symphonies. The symphony omits the minuet typically found in classical-era works, laying its three movements out in fast-slow-fast form.

• 4. The Movement That Failed to Please

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  The original slow movement of the Paris Symphony was an Andantino in 6/8 time. According to Otto Erich Deutsch, who documented the symphony's performance history, that movement "had failed to please." Mozart replaced it with a new Andante when the work returned to the Concert Spirituel on the 15th of August 1778. Both movements survive, and so does a sketch of an earlier, longer version of the Andantino. That means three versions of the slow movement exist in various stages of completion. The replacement was not a small revision; it was a fresh composition responding to audience reaction. The autograph manuscript, including both versions of the middle movement, is preserved in the Berlin State Library. The symphony's continued popularity is visible in the performance record: Deutsch documents additional Concert Spirituel performances in 1779 on the 18th of March, the 23rd of March, the 23rd of May, and the 3rd of June, followed by another on the 14th of May 1780. Sieber's catalog described it as "in the repertoire of the Concert Spirituel" from 1782 through 1788.

• 5. Publication and a Vienna Benefit

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  Jean-Georges Sieber published the symphony in Paris, with the sale announced on the 20th of February 1779. That publication may have made the Paris Symphony the first of Mozart's symphonies to reach print. The work also traveled beyond France. On the 11th of March 1783, it was performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna as part of a benefit concert for the singer Aloysia Weber, who was Mozart's sister-in-law. Weber was herself a professional vocalist, and her connection to Mozart made the choice of this particular symphony a personal one as well as a practical programming decision. The concert took place roughly five years after the Paris premiere, by which point the symphony had already accumulated a substantial performance history at the Concert Spirituel. Sadie observes that the thematic material is relatively conventional, more a matter of figures than melodies, with ideas worked out primarily at the moment of their presentation rather than through development sections.