Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Concerto for Violin & Orchestra No. 5 in A major, K. 219, “Turkish”
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart (he never used “Amadeus” except when making a joke) was born in Salzburg, Austria in 1756 and died in Vienna in 1791. He composed this concerto in 1775. It was probably performed in Salzburg soon after it was written, with Mozart himself the soloist, but the details of the first performance are unknown. Mozart left no cadenzas. The score calls for solo violin, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 horns, and strings.

*****

“The violin is hanging up on its nail, I suppose.” So lamented Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang, in a letter to his son. When the younger Mozart moved to Vienna his career as a violinist had come to an end: he preferred taking the viola part in chamber music and when he died he didn’t even own a violin.

By all accounts Mozart had been a superb violinist. Even the hard-to-please Leopold thought so: “You yourself do not know how well you play the violin. If only you would do yourself credit and play with energy, with your whole heart and soul, yes, just as if you were the first violinist in all Europe.” And Leopold would have known—he was not only an excellent violinist himself, he had written a treatise on violin playing that is still relevant today.

While in Salzburg the younger Mozart wrote five violin concertos for his own use, one in 1773 and the rest in 1775. Though the last four were composed within months of each other they show a remarkable degree of growth from one to the next, as well as the precocious spirit of their nineteen year-old composer. The last, No. 5 in A major K. 219, is both the biggest and most masterful of all.

Mozart was rarely satisfied to have a soloist enter a concerto in a conventional way, and so it is here. After a brief orchestral exposition the music simply comes to a stop after a little upward arpeggio; the violin enters, adagio, as if in its own little world, playing music seemingly unrelated to what came before. After some dreamy meditation the soloist seems to realize that there’s a concerto going on and leads things back to the matters at hand. This is when we realize that the orchestral “theme” that opened the movement wasn’t really the theme at all: it was the merely accompaniment to the theme now played by the soloist. The movement ends with the same little arpeggio that ushered in the soloist at the beginning of the movement.

The Adagio is one of those movements that remind us of why we keep coming back to Mozart. One magical moment follows another in a way that makes time stand still. The minor key central section is nothing less than sublime.

Mozart called the finale a Rondeau (as opposed to rondo) because it contains an “interruption” of wildly contrasting music, something considered to be a characteristic of the French rondo. The work begins as a rather stately minuet, but midway through there comes a burst of passionate Gypsy music in a duple-meter and faster tempo. This is the “Turkish” music that gives the concerto its nickname. Never mind that it’s much more “Hungarian” than “Turkish”—if it came from the East it was Turkish to Mozart’s audience. The stomping, rustic refrain of this music makes the lyrical passages seem to soar. The minuet eventually returns to give us a graceful close—and the violin goes back up on its nail, this time for good.