{ Program Notes
with a very unusual project. He asked
Mozart to create a new singspiel — the
Viennese equivalent of a Broadway
musical— to present at the Theater auf
der Wieden, a venue that catered to the
ordinary Viennese public rather than the
aristocratic audiences Mozart usually
composed for. Schikaneder himself wrote
the fantastic fairy-tale libretto for Die Zauberflöte, or The Magic Flute as we know
it in English, and Mozart clothed it in
music of sublime simplicity and wit. It was
premiered on September 30, 1791, under
Mozart’s baton, just nine weeks before his
death. That winter as he lay dying, the
composer had the consolation of knowing that The Magic Flute was still playing
to enthusiastic, sold-out audiences — the
greatest hit of his career.
Schikaneder made the flute — an
instrument Mozart once told his father he
despised—into a talisman that protects the
hero, Prince Tamino. Early in the story,
the sinister Queen of the Night presents
Tamino with the flute, which she tells him
will protect him from danger as he seeks
to rescue her beautiful daughter, Pamina,
from the powerful priest Sarastro. And at
the opera’s end, the magic flute does its job
as Tamino plays it while passing through
fire and water with his beloved. Having
successfully endured this double ordeal,
Tamino and Pamina are hailed as the new
rulers of Sarastro’s kingdom.
As well as high comedy and romance,
The Magic Flute possesses a serious ethical
side, and we hear both these qualities
in its remarkable overture. As dedicated
Masons, Mozart and Schikaneder incorporated some of the symbolism of the
Masonic rites into the music and plot of
their opera. For Masons, the number three
possessed mystical significance. Thus at
the beginning and again in the middle
of the overture, we hear three noble brass
chords in the key of E-flat major, a key using three flats. The rest of the overture is
a merry fugue, in which a sparkling little
tune romps through the instruments in
this greatest of Mozart’s overtures.
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings.
16 O v ertur e |
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Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551,
“Jupiter”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart did not actually call his last and
most famous symphony, completed on
August 10, 1788, the “Jupiter.” According
to his son Franz Xaver Mozart, it was the
London impresario Johann Peter Salomon
(the same man who engineered Haydn’s
spectacular London career in the 1790s)
who devised this nickname as a catchy advertising device for the symphony’s London
performances in 1819.
Why might Salomon have chosen the
name of the thunderbolt-hurling chief of
the Roman gods for this work? Certainly
it is the loftiest and most magisterial of
Mozart’s symphonies, with a formal and
ceremonial quality in keeping with its key
of C major. Although today we think of
C major \