Mozart: Violin Concert No. 3 — Spartanburg Philharmonic

It has become almost a truism that a child prodigy’s life is a stressful and demanding one, but Mozart, probably the most prodigious prodigy of them all, had no such experience. Despite his extensive tours from city to city and country to country, despite his frequent performances for Europe’s most powerful nobility, despite his near-total lack of playmates his own age, Mozart’s childhood was, by all accounts, generally a happy one. For him, the trouble came later – but that’s a story for another program note.

At least some small portion of his childhood contentment – and some large portion of his musical development – must be credited to the city that was his home. As oppressive and confining as Salzburg seemed to the adult Mozart, and as contentious as his relations with the Prince-Archbishop who employed him, they in many ways provided a perfect situation during the composer’s childhood. Salzburg was big enough and sophisticated enough to offer a variety of opportunities, yet small enough to be supportive and unthreatening. He performed on violin and viola as well as the keyboard instruments, and heard his music as soon as it was written (a privilege today’s young composers can only dream of). By the time he was 18, Mozart had written two dozen symphonies, concertos for several instruments, and choral and chamber works of all kinds.

So when, in 1775, Mozart turned his hand to the violin concerto, he was already mature enough both to sum up the recent advances of his compositional contemporaries and to push beyond them to new heights of expressivity and formal inventiveness. He had spent many an hour in the Salzburg of his youth writing and performing serenades, the loosely-structured, melodious instrumental pieces that served as background music for the Prince-Archbishop’s many outdoor soirées. And on his travels he was never happier than backstage in the opera houses of Italy.

Both opera and serenade shape the third violin concerto, the one on tonight’s program. The first movement’s opening theme is nothing less than an extended quote of one of the arias in his own opera Il re pastore; the songlike second-movement Adagio would have been equally at home played outdoors, in a serenade, or sung on the stage of an opera house, in an aria. (In the second movement Mozart instructs his oboists to swap that instrument for the softer sounds of the flute, a trick Salzburg’s oboists were often called on to do.) Even more serenade-y (to coin a word) is the piece’s finale, where lively but remarkably unrelated dance episodes sandwich another borrowed melody, this one by Dittersdorf (whom keen-eyed readers will surely recall from his appearance on a Spartanburg Philharmonic program last Spring!).

What all this adds up to a masterwork written by a 19-year-old. It already bears the ultimate mark of the mature composer’s genius: an effortless ability to extract what is useful from the music of his contemporaries and predecessors without ever being hemmed in by their conventions.

Chris Vaneman is the Dean of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse University. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.