K525 "Eine Kleine NachtMusik" MozartForum Articles

Dennis Pajot

On August 10, 1787, Mozart entered in his work catalogue "Eine Kleine NachtMusick, consisting of an Allegro, Menuett and Trio, Romance, Menuett and Trio and Finale.--2 Violins, Viola and Bassi". The autograph shows that the first Menuet and Trio has been torn out, and there is no knowledge of that music.

Alfred Einstein supposed the piano minuet in B (K.Anh136/498a) had been transcribed from a string piece by August E. Müller, and had originally been the lost movement to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. No-one else to my knowledge goes along with that theory. The 4-movement Eine kleine Nachtmusik was first printed in 1826/27 by André of Offenbach with the title "Serenade" (Mozart's autograph has no title).

The occasion for the work is completely unknown, so anyone's guess is just as good as the next person's. Mozart's father had died on May 28, 1787, so some scholars believe Eine Kleine would be "the perfect serenade to recall all those serenades and divertimenti of the Salzburg years", thus Eine Kleine serving as "a memorial" to his father. Other commentators, among them Alfred Einstein, speculate it was written as a foil to K522 "Ein musikalisches Spass" (A Musical Joke), a "parody both of poor compositional techniques and of poor instrumental performance", entered in Mozart's catalogue on June 14, 1787, but according to Alan Tyson composed long before that. According to Einstein's theory Mozart wrote the Musical Joke in memory of his father then "after Mozart had disturbed the cosmic system by the Musikalischer Spass he set it to rights again with the Kleine Nachtmusik". But as H.C.R. Landon writes "Such insights serve only to reveal a lack of understanding concerning Mozart's way of thinking, he was always in a special world of his own, and his inner world had very little to do with the external realities of life".

Karl Heinz Füssl, the editor of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe edition of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (K525), believed Mozart thought of a chamber orchestra for performance of the piece; perhaps consisting of two 1st Violins, two 2nd Violins, two Violas, and one cello and one Double Bass. As Andrew Raeburn writes in the Compleat Mozart "Although the work sounds splendid played by a string orchestra, the balance of the (admittedly ambiguous) historical evidence suggests that Mozart probably had one-on-a part performance in mind". James Webster's article "The Scoring of Mozart's chamber music for Strings" agrees with the solo scoring, concluding "Eine kleine Nachtmusik has always seemed a miraculous encapsulation of classical style in a tiny format, a sublimation of the informal traditions of chamber music into the highest art". H,C.Robbins Landon says this simply "This might, quite simply, be considered the most beautiful piece of occasional music ever written, hence its enduring appeal".

Incidentally there is a fragment of 16 measures (K.Anh69/525a) that because of its identical instrumentation (and also on the same paper type) is believed to be a first draft to the slow movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
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Addition:

In the introduction of the 1988 facsimile of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K525 from Bärenreiter, Wolfgang Rehm debunks a (minor) Mozart myth. That is that the lost Menuet and Trio had been "ripped" out of the score by someone. Rehm states that the remaining 7 untrimmed leaves (loose bifolios and single leaves) that contain the music to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik show no trace of an earlier binding or joining together, so one cannot speak of a "forceful" extraction as has long been assumed in the Mozart literature.

He gives the layout of the autograph, and it becomes easy to see how the page with this Menuet and Trio could have become lost. The autograph of K525 is laid out this way:

Filios "1" and "2" (1 bifolio) = Allegro
Filio 3 (single leaf) = Lost Menuet and Trio
Filios "4" and "5" (1 bifolio) = Romance
Filio "6" (single leaf) = Menuet and Trio (front) and beginning of Rondo (back)
Filios "7" and "8" (2 single leaves) = end of Rondo.

Thus imagine the original autograph as two large sheets of paper folded in half, with 4 regular sheets assembled together. One can imagine one of the single sheets (that with the 1st Menuet and Trio) somewhere falling out.

Rehm also brings up the (seldom) used practice of attempting to replace the lost Menuet and Trio. First Alfred Einstein thought he recognized this lost music in a piano piece attributed to Mozart, K498a. Christopher Hogwood choose a "substitute Menuet" written jointly by Mozart and his English pupil Thomas Attwood to restore the Serenade's original proportions in his L'Oiseau Lyre recording in the 1980's. However Rehm states these "differ so markedly both stylistically and qualitatively from the familiar character of the little Serenade that in fact only one conclusion remains: Until the single leaf with the 1st Menuet composed unquestionably by Mozart comes to light again, the Serenade should continue to be performed with the traditional arrangement of movements. Additions, even when they draw on other material by the same composer, are but rarely crowned with success, in the special case of Mozart, however as well as never".

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K525 "Eine Kleine NachtMusik"

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