Die Flötenkonzerte KV 313/314 Andante KV 315

Abstract

In a letter of 10 December 1777 Mozart reported to his father from Mannheim that Johann Baptist Wendling, principal flautist of the famous Mannheim Orchestra, had been approached by a wealthy Dutch businessman by the name of De Jean, who was prepared to pay 200 gulden for three easy flute concertos and four flute quartets for his own use. Mozart accepted the commission with the understanding that the works were to be ready before De Jean left for Paris in mid-February 1778. By the day before the Dutchman left, Mozart had delivered only three of the quartets and two concertos, for which he had been paid only 964 gulden. The composer, who was himself being pressed by his father to continue his own journey to Paris with his mother, was full of excuses, writing back to Salzburg on 14 February, "It is not surprising I have been unable to finish them, for I never have a single hour's quiet here.... Moreover, you know I become quite powerless when I am obliged to write for an instrument I can't stand."

There is more than a hint of disingenuousness in Mozart's words, for this was the height of the period during which he was being distracted from his work by his new-found love for the Mannheim singer Aloysia Weber. (He ultimately married her sister, Constanze.) Of the two flute concertos Mozart handed over to De Jean, the second, in D major, was not even a new work, but an arrangement of an oboe concerto he had composed in Salzburg in the previous year. If Mozart's dislike of the flute was as great as he claimed, there are few signs in the Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major, particularly in the expressive central Adagio ma non troppo. The outer movements are an Allegro maestoso and a concluding Rondo: Tempo di Menuetto. The work is scored for two oboes (replaced by flutes in the Adagio), two horns, and strings. For nearly two hundred years, scholars believed Mozart's Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major, K. 314 (K. 285d) was originally composed for the flute in Mannheim in early 1778. In 1952, musicologist Bernhard Paumgartner demonstrated conclusively that Mozart reworked the Oboe Concerto in C major, K. 271k, into a concerto for flute. Mozart composed the Oboe Concerto for Giuseppe Ferlendis, oboist in the orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg, sometime between the beginning of Ferlendis' service at the Salzburg court (April 1, 1777) and Mozart's departure for Mannheim (September 22, 1777). Mozart's father probably sent the manuscript of the Oboe Concerto to Mozart, when he apparently used the work in an attempt to get himself out of an embarrassing situation. According to Mozart, Ferdinand Dejean, a surgeon with the Dutch East India Co. whom Mozart had met in Mannheim, commissioned three flute concertos from the composer. Only one exists from this period, K. 313/285c. Most likely, Mozart revised the Salzburg Oboe Concerto to present to Dejean as a new flute concerto. Mozart never finished the third piece and the composer's fee was not fully paid. (Dejean also commissioned three flute quartets, only two of which Mozart finished.)

Mozart's Flute Concerto in D major, K. 314, is an honest reworking of the oboe piece, not merely a transposition from C major to D major. The composer's sensitivity to the differences between the flute and the oboe enabled him to produce a flute part so idiomatically composed that subsequent generations praised the work as an original flute concerto. The concerto is scored for an orchestra of two oboes, two horns and strings. The first movement is far more interesting than that of the G major concerto, K. 313. In K. 314, the orchestration is scored in a lighter, more transparent fashion, highlighting the soloist and giving the numerous recurrent rhythmic figures more presence, especially the falling passage in the orchestra that first introduces the solo flute. Mozart's central slow movement is elegiac, with the flute placed throughout in its most liquid range. Mozart once wrote that he despised the flute, but the elegance of this movement makes this difficult to believe. The ebullient, Haydnesque finale is a Rondo in a quick 2/4 meter, with a rondo-theme that is bouncy and jagged. Most notable is the beginning of the central episode in which a tune based on the rondo-theme is developed in three-part counterpoint. In the fall of 1777 Mozart left Salzburg in the company of his mother. Traveling via Munich and Augsburg, they arrived in Mannheim at the end of October. At the time Mannheim was the home of arguably the finest orchestra in Europe, boasting among an elite corps of wind players such names as the famous flautist Johann-Baptiste Wendling. It appears to have been Wendling who gained for Mozart the commission to compose three flute concertos and four flute quartets on behalf a Dutch amateur, Ferdinand Dejean. Despite his professed dislike of the instrument, Mozart responded enthusiastically to the commission in a letter to his father, doubtless partially in an attempt to deflect paternal criticism of the length of his stay in Mannheim. In the event, only one wholly new concerto was completed, the other Mozart supplied to Dejean (K314 in D) being an arrangement of an oboe concerto he had written for the Mannheim oboist Giuseppe Ferlendis. The Andante in C has been dated from much the same period as the concertos, and may have been designed as either an alternative central movement for the Flute Concerto in G, K413, or possibly as a slow movement for the third concerto Mozart failed to write for Dejean.