Symphony No. 38 (Mozart)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart's Symphony No. 38 in D major, K. 504, had its premiere on the 19th of January 1787 in Prague. Not in Vienna, where Mozart's fortunes had always risen and fallen with the public mood, but in a foreign city where he was received as something close to a hero. That single fact raises a chain of questions: why Prague? Was this symphony actually written for Prague? And why, alone among all the symphonies Mozart composed for Viennese concert halls in his maturity, does it have no minuet? The answers lead into one of the most carefully examined puzzles in Mozart scholarship, touching paper types, missing manuscript pages, and the tangled aftermath of an opera that changed everything.

• 2. The Prague Connection

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  Le nozze di Figaro was the opera that opened a door. During the 1786-87 winter season at the National Theatre in Prague, which is now called the Estates Theatre, the opera's reception was overwhelming. Mozart was invited to the city by a group of musicians and patrons, as recorded in a letter written by his father Leopold in January 1787. The Prague press did not print a word about the opera's enormous success until the 11th of December 1786, a date that falls five days after Mozart had already completed the symphony, on the 6th of December 1786 according to his own autograph thematic catalogue. That gap matters. It means Mozart finished this symphony before any written record of the Prague sensation reached him, leaving open the possibility that news arrived through other channels, or that the invitation came even earlier, perhaps during rehearsals, when the orchestra musicians would already have understood what they were playing. What is certain is that the symphony was not performed in Vienna before it travelled to Prague.

• 3. The Wind Players of Bohemia

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  Bohemia's wind players carried a reputation across all of Europe, and the Prague press had specifically credited their skill with part of the success of both Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Le nozze di Figaro in the city. The Prague Symphony makes use of winds in a way that stands apart from virtually everything Mozart had written before it. Passages occur in which the strings fall entirely silent and only wind ensembles carry the music forward. It would be difficult, the scholarship suggests, to find any earlier symphony by any composer of the ordinary kind that leans so heavily on winds alone in this way. Whether Mozart designed this specifically to flatter Prague's celebrated players, or whether it grew naturally out of two years of orchestration experiments he had been conducting in the accompaniments of his piano concertos, the effect was unprecedented in symphonic writing. That advance in technique was not isolated to this one work: it continued into Mozart's final symphonies, and was later taken up by Haydn in his London symphonies, and by both Beethoven and Schubert.

• 4. Tyson and the Paper Trail

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  Alan Tyson spent years identifying paper types in Mozart's autograph manuscripts, and what he found in the Prague Symphony upended the obvious assumption about how the work was assembled. The third movement was written first. Its paper matches the type Mozart used while composing Le nozze di Figaro earlier in 1786; the first and second movements, by contrast, were written on paper that corresponds to Mozart's other work from late that same year. Tyson also found something else: a copy Mozart had made of a trumpet part for his earlier D major symphony, the one now called the Paris Symphony, No. 31. That copy sits on the same late-December paper type as the first two movements of K. 504. From these threads Tyson wove a conjecture, offered with his own characteristic diffidence. Mozart may have planned to bring the Paris Symphony to Prague and made the trumpet copy because the original part had gone missing. He may then have drafted a new finale for it, which ultimately became the third movement of the Prague Symphony. Eventually, running short on time, he decided to compose an entirely new work and wrote the first and second movements on the December paper. Tyson also proposed that the missing minuet was simply a casualty of that compressed timeline.

• 5. A Symphony Without a Minuet

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  By the late 1780s, a symphony written in Vienna without a minuet would have been, in the words of the scholarship, extraordinarily unusual. The standard format in Germany and Austria had included a minuet since the 1750s, giving the familiar fast-slow-minuet-fast shape. Mozart himself had never written a three-movement symphony for Vienna, not even as a child in the 1760s when the older three-movement pattern was still widespread across Europe. The Prague Symphony ignores the convention entirely. Daniel E. Freeman has offered one explanation rooted in geography rather than accident: the three-movement format might have been a deliberate appeal to Prague's musical taste. The only Prague-born symphonist Mozart knew well was Josef Mysliveček, a close associate of the Mozart family from 1770 to 1778. Nearly all of Mysliveček's symphonies follow the Italian three-movement pattern, fitting the country where he spent most of his working life. Freeman also notes that the first movement's introduction is probably the longest and most sophisticated slow introduction written for any major symphony up to that point, possibly designed to compensate for the missing movement and bring the total length closer to a standard four-movement work. No explanation has been declared definitive.

• 6. Inside the Three Movements

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  The first movement is one of only three Mozart symphonies that open with a slow introduction; the other two are No. 36, the Linz, and No. 39. The introduction yields to an allegro in which six melodies are developed and recapitulated in a densely contrapuntal treatment of sonata-allegro form. The opening of that allegro is itself unusual: the first theme is passed between the second violins, who begin it, and the first violins, who complete it. Certain phrases in the movement bear a resemblance to the overture of Die Zauberflöte. The second movement is in the subdominant key of G major and shifts into a minor key at points, producing contrasting moods within a structure typical of Mozart's symphonies of the period. The third movement is a Presto in which the flute takes a prominent role, particularly when counterpointing the main melody through the development section. One commentator described this finale as showing Mozart in an unusual mood, closer to Beethoven's boisterousness than his normally fastidious taste would ordinarily allow. The full scoring calls for two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings, with every movement cast in sonata form.