Mozart & Beethoven — what’s in a symphony?

by Ivan Rockey

On 21 February 1765 Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart, brother and sister, gave a performance in the Haymarket Little Theatre, London, presented by their father Leopold. The programme for the event has not survived but the notices published that day announced that ‘All the Overtures [i.e. Symphonies] will be from the Composition of these astonishing Composers, who are only eight years old’. In fact, Wolfgang had just turned nine (and Nannerl was four years older) and this was the first public performance of one of his symphonies.

Wolfgang and Nannerl at the keyboard with their father Leopold Mozart

Little documentation is to be found for the first of Mozart’s concerts in London, but from others it is possible to guess at the details of the occasion. The main events of the evening would have been the little Mozarts playing the harpsichord or the chamber organ, interspersed with solos from some of London’s own virtuosi, but at either end of the concert there would have been a symphony, in this case Mozart’s first. The orchestra on this occasion contained only twenty or so players and to judge from Leopold Mozart’s complaints about the poor takings, the audience was a rather modest one too.

Almost sixty years after this, on 23 May 1824, the Gross Redoutensaal in Vienna was the venue for a far different concert. Once again the occasion was presided over by a composer conducting his own work, but here it was the elderly, and nearly deaf, Beethoven (on account of his deafness the orchestra had actually been instructed to ignore Beethoven). The concert was his last and the symphony which he conducted was his last, and compared with Mozart’s first it was truly monumental in scale — lasting about five times as long it involved almost 200 performers, including four soloists and a choir of a hundred.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Between the two events described here Mozart and Beethoven wrote about eighty symphonies and Haydn, already in his mid-twenties when Mozart was born, wrote more than sixty. However, in the course of this half-century, and through the works of these three composers, the symphony changed almost beyond recognition.

For the young Mozart, brought up on the music of JC Bach and, naturally, Leopold Mozart, the symphony was simply an orchestral work of several movements, most commonly three. It was related to the earlier form of the overture — fast, slow, fast — and often served the same purpose as a concert or an opera opener. Fairly soon however, another movement was added between the second and the third. This was the minuet, a classical dance in a stately waltz tempo. But the tendency was towards a faster movement and the speed of the minuet gradually increased until, in Beethoven’s Symphony No.3 (Eroica) for example, it is replaced by a scherzo (literally ‘a joke’). With a tempo about three times as fast as a minuet, no dancer would have been able to keep up!

Along with the increase in the number of movements came an increase in their length. Whereas a few of the movements from Mozart’s earliest symphonies take less than a minute, some of his later ones (and many of Beethoven’s) come in at nearer fifteen.

This general increase in scale was all part and parcel of a change in the function of the symphony. Mozart’s later symphonies were the centrepiece of many of his concerts, along with the piano concertos which he would play himself. The symphony no longer served as the ‘bookends’ of a concert as they had in 1783 when, in the first performance of Mozart’s Symphony No.35 symphony (Haffner), he began the concert with the first three movements of the new work, followed this with a full two hours worth of separate pieces, and then finished with the last movement of the symphony.

Ludwig van Beethoven

It was Beethoven, however, who took the symphony on to the grand scale that it was to have throughout the nineteenth century. The third and fifth symphonies were well on the way to ‘the century of the Romantics’, taking on where Mozart’s 39th, 40th and 41st had left off, but it was the choral ninth that truly showed the way forward. But if Mozart had been around to hear Beethoven’s ninth he would probably have been even more confused than its many early critics. Louis Spohr, for example, may have thought that ‘the fourth movement is, in my opinion, so monstrous and tasteless and, in its grasp of Schiller’s Ode, so trivial that I cannot understand how a genius like Beethoven could have written it’ but it, along with all of Beethoven’s and Mozart’s symphonies, have stood the test of time far better than the symphonies of, for example, Louis Spohr!