Mozart: Symphony No. 41 'Jupiter' - IV. Molto allegro (Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra)

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Christopher MacIntyre

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Published on April 19, 2015 6:53:38 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfRS4GA3oFc

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Symphony (2012)

Duration: 8:40

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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 as the plainest and most basic of keys — all white notes on the piano — in the late 18th century it was usually associated with court and high-church pomp since it was well suited to the valveless trumpets of the period. And we find two of them adding brilliance to this work, along with the timpani that invariably accompanied them.

The "Jupiter's" ceremonial quality, however, extends far beyond key and scoring. Throughout this work, there is a majesty of conception we find in no other Mozart symphony. Its melodic themes are more formal and less personal than those he created for its two companions, Symphonies 39 and 40; Donald Francis Tovey called them not only formal but formulas: stock musical gestures used over and over by composers in the late 18th century. The originality and greatness of the "Jupiter" are not to be found in the materials Mozart used but in how he used them.

In the finale (Molto allegro) Mozart leaves the best to last. Throughout the 1780s, he had studied counterpoint — the art of weaving together many independent musical lines — with passionate interest and had poured over the scores of J. S. Bach. But rather than a ponderous display of contrapuntal erudition, he uses the intricate interplay of his instrumental lines here to create an overwhelming sense of richness, splendor, and excitement. Mozart weaves his magic with a half-dozen pithy themes, beginning with the sturdy opening four-note motive. Derived from Gregorian chant, this theme was a musical cliché of the period, used frequently by other composers as well as Mozart himself in earlier works. But again the artistry is not in the “what” but in the “how.” The apotheosis comes in the closing moments of the symphony when Mozart sets five of his themes spinning together in a double fugue, revealing, in Elaine Sisman's words, "vistas of contrapuntal infinity."

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