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Classical 101

Mozart Minute: Popular in Prague

color image of a portrait of Mozart in which he wears a bright red suit
Wikipedia
Catch The Mozart Minute every Friday at noon during the Amadeus Deli, and listen to The Mozart Minute podcast at wosu.org/podcasts.

Mozart's Prague Symphony is one of his most popular symphonies. And we might have the city of Prague itself to thank for it.

When Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro was given its first Prague performances in December 1786, the locals went ape over the opera. A group of what Leopold Mozart termed in a letter to his daughter, Nannerl, "distinguished connoisseurs and lovers of music" - in other words, fans - invited Mozart to travel to Prague to conduct and perform there (The Letters of Mozart and His Family, trans Emily Anderson).

Mozart was in Prague for the first few months of 1787. There, he conducted a performance of Figaro and put together a concert of his own music, including one of his symphonies. It is thought that this symphony was the work now numbered as Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 in D major, and known as his "Prague" symphony, referring to the city where the symphony was first performed.

The Prague symphony remains one of Mozart's most popular symphonies. Yet despite its brilliance and ongoing popularity, its composer paid it painfully little attention in his letters. Mozart's correspondence from his time in Prague shows him thoroughly enjoying the Figaro-mania that had gripped the city. How could his Prague symphony, great though it may be, compete with the phenomenal popularity of its operatic older sibling?

Mozart's relative silence about the symphony could have relegated the work to obscurity early on. But Prague's overwhelmingly positive response to the work may have helped keep it alive. On February 9, 1794, a little more than two years after Mozart's death, a Prague newspaper published a review of the concert of Mozart's music performed there two days earlier. The author wrote that Mozart's best works had been performed, describing the program's final work as "one of the best symphonies there is, one in D major by Mozart." (Otto Erich Deutsch Mozart: A Documentary Biography, trans. E. Blom, P. Branscombe and J. Noble). That symphony is thought to have been either Mozart's Paris symphony or, perhaps more logically, the same symphony Mozart himself premiered in Prague – his Prague symphony.

The 1794 review shows the great extent of Prague's love for Mozart's music. The author wrote, "... nowhere was (Mozart's) music better understood and executed than in Prague, and even in the country districts it is universally popular … so many were the hearts that Mozart's great genius won for itself."

Jennifer Hambrick unites her extensive backgrounds in the arts and media and her deep roots in Columbus to bring inspiring music to central Ohio as Classical 101’s midday host. Jennifer performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago before earning a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.