Symphony No. 40 (Mozart)

• 1. Introduction

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  Symphony No. 40 in G minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of those works where the opening notes arrive like a physical force. The lower strings murmur an accompaniment before any melody appears, a deliberate inversion of what listeners expect. Then the first theme surfaces, restless and searching, and the question hangs in the air: how did this symphony come to be one of the most performed and recorded orchestral works ever written?

  Mozart completed the symphony on the 25th of July 1788, entering it into the careful catalog he kept of his mature works. He was working at a pace that borders on the incomprehensible. The 39th and 41st symphonies were finished within the same span of weeks. Critics would argue for centuries whether the 40th was written in grief, in triumph, or in some untranslatable emotional register that defies easy naming. Robert Schumann heard "Grecian lightness and grace." Charles Rosen called it "a work of passion, violence, and grief." Both cannot be entirely wrong, which may explain why the symphony has never left the repertoire.

• 2. A Summer of Three Symphonies

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  June and August of 1788 bracket a compositional sprint that has few parallels in the history of music. Mozart entered the 39th Symphony into his catalog on the 26th of June and the 41st on the 10th of August; the 40th landed between them on the 25th of July. The conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt argued that Mozart may have conceived all three as a single unified work. His evidence included the structural fact that the 40th, sitting in the middle, has no slow introduction, unlike No. 39, and lacks a finale of the monumental scale found in No. 41.

  Mozart had written in G minor before. His 25th symphony, composed when he was seventeen, drew on the fashionable Sturm und Drang movement sweeping European music. That earlier work is sometimes called the "Little G minor symphony" to set it apart from the 40th. Together they are the only minor-key symphonies among all of Mozart's extant symphonic output.

  The 40th symphony exists in two distinct versions. The main difference is that one version adds a pair of clarinets, requiring corresponding adjustments throughout the other wind parts. The autograph scores for both versions were purchased in the 1860s by Johannes Brahms, who later donated them to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, where they are still held today.

• 3. Did Mozart Hear It Performed?

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  For a long time, a persistent legend suggested that Mozart never heard his 40th Symphony played. Some writers pushed the claim further, arguing that he wrote the work not for any concert hall but for posterity, a phrase Alfred Einstein rendered as "an appeal to eternity." Modern research has largely dismantled that story.

  A letter dated the 10th of July 1802, written by musician Johann Wenzel to the publisher Ambrosius Kühnel in Leipzig, describes a performance of the symphony at the home of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, with Mozart present. The execution was apparently so poor that the composer had to leave the room. It is a grimly comic image: Mozart fleeing his own masterwork.

  Beyond that letter, there is strong circumstantial evidence for further performances. Surviving concert programs from Dresden on the 14th of April 1789, Leipzig on the 12th of May 1789, and Frankfurt on the 15th of October 1790 all advertise a Mozart symphony without specifying which one. A poster for a concert on the 17th of April 1791 at the Burgtheater in Vienna, given by the Tonkünstler-Societät and conducted by Antonio Salieri, lists "A Grand Symphony composed by Herr Mozart" as the opening item.

  The strongest evidence of all is the symphony's revision. Neal Zaslaw argued that Mozart would not have gone to the trouble of adding clarinets and reworking the flute and oboe parts unless a specific performance was in view. The 1791 Vienna concert featured the clarinetist brothers Anton and Johann Nepomuk Stadler, a detail that narrows the candidates to just the 39th and 40th symphonies. For the 1788 premiere season, scholar Otto Erich Deutsch proposed that Mozart had planned a set of three "Concerts in the Casino" at a venue in the Spiegelgasse owned by Philipp Otto, even sending tickets to his friend Michael Puchberg. Whether those concerts actually took place remains unknown.

• 4. Inside the Four Movements

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  The first movement, marked Molto allegro, opens with the violas divided below the main texture, stating the accompaniment before any melody arrives. Mozart used the same trick later in his final piano concerto, K. 595, and the technique would become a hallmark of the Romantic era, appearing in the openings of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto.

  The second movement, marked Andante, moves into E major, the subdominant key of B major, which is the relative major of G minor. The opening bars are built on counterpoint, voices weaving around one another in the manner of an earlier century. Zaslaw later suggested that Joseph Haydn, in his 1801 oratorio The Seasons, may have quoted this slow movement in a passage meditating on death, including it as a tribute to his long-dead friend.

  The minuet is built on hemiola rhythm, a cross-accented device where the music implies a different meter than the one actually notated. Mozart writes it in pairs of three-bar phrases, which gives the movement an unstable, argumentative quality. The traditional minuet was dance music, but this one pushes against that expectation. A contrasting trio section in G major then hands the melody between strings and winds.

  The finale, marked Allegro assai, opens with a Mannheim rocket: a rapid ascent through the notes of the tonic chord. Simon P. Keefe noted that unlike Mozart's other G minor works, where the last movement typically lightens the mood, here the minor key persists all the way to the final chord. The development section contains a modulating passage that passes through every note of the chromatic scale except one: G itself, the tonic, the note that would restore stability. Its absence is not an accident.

• 5. Legacy in Classicism and Romanticism

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  Ludwig van Beethoven copied out 29 bars from the 40th Symphony into one of his sketchbooks. As Gustav Nottebohm observed in 1887, those copied bars appear among the sketches for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and the opening pitch sequence of the Fifth's third movement resembles that of Mozart's finale. Franz Schubert did something similar, transcribing Mozart's minuet, and the minuet of Schubert's own Fifth Symphony carries a strong echo of the earlier work.

  The 19th century saw a broad decline in interest in 18th-century music, but the 40th Symphony never lost its audience. Zaslaw and Cowdery identified it as a key work for understanding the bridge between musical Classicism and Romanticism. Its emotional intensity kept it in concert programs even when other Mozart symphonies faded from regular performance.

  Critics writing in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung tracked its reputation in real time. In 1804 the journal praised it as "a true masterpiece." By 1809 the same publication was calling it "Mozart's symphony of all symphonies." A 1813 review used the phrase "classical masterwork." The first known recording was issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1915, with the Victor Concert Orchestra under Walter B. Rogers, and the work has been recorded on modern instruments and period instruments alike ever since.