Mozart and dance
Encyclopedia
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
wrote a great deal of dance
Dance
Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting....
music. This article covers the types of dances that Mozart wrote, their musical characteristics, and their reception by the public both in Mozart's day and in modern times. Mozart's dance compositions relate to a personal trait of this composer: he was himself a great enthusiast for dancing. The article covers Mozart's training as a dancer, his high level of skill, and the various opportunities he had in his lifetime to go dancing.
Dance music composed by Mozart
There are about 200 dances by Mozart still preserved. The modern edition of the dances as published by the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (see External Links below) runs to about 300 total pages in score. For a complete listing of Mozart's dances, see this list.History
Mozart began writing dances when he was five years old; see Nannerl NotenbuchNannerl Notenbuch
The Nannerl Notenbuch, or Notenbuch für Nannerl is a book in which Leopold Mozart, from 1759 to about 1764, wrote pieces for his daughter, Maria Anna Mozart , to learn and play. His son Wolfgang also used the book, in which his earliest compositions were recorded...
. In 1768, when Mozart was 12, his father Leopold
Leopold Mozart
Johann Georg Leopold Mozart was a German composer, conductor, teacher, and violinist. Mozart is best known today as the father and teacher of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and for his violin textbook Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule.-Childhood and student years:He was born in Augsburg, son of...
reported that Wolfgang had composed "many minuets for all types of instrument". Mozart continued to write dance music for various occasions during the Salzburg period of his life (up to 1781).
Following his move to Vienna, the pace of dance music composition increased, as on 7 December 1787 Mozart was appointed Royal and Imperial Chamber Composer for Emperor Joseph II
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor
Joseph II was Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790 and ruler of the Habsburg lands from 1780 to 1790. He was the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I...
. This post, though largely a sinecure, had as its main duty the composition of dances for the balls held in the Redoutensälen (public ballrooms) of the Imperial Palace
Hofburg Imperial Palace
Hofburg Palace is a palace located in Vienna, Austria, that has housed some of the most powerful people in Austrian history, including the Habsburg dynasty, rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It currently serves as the official residence of the President of Austria...
. Mozart complied with this requirement scrupulously, composing dances in great number. He generally wrote dances each year between late December and early March; this reflected the scheduling of the imperial balls, which according to Abert were held "every Sunday during the carnival
Carnival
Carnaval is a festive season which occurs immediately before Lent; the main events are usually during February. Carnaval typically involves a public celebration or parade combining some elements of a circus, mask and public street party...
season, as well as on the last Thursday before Lent
Lent
In the Christian tradition, Lent is the period of the liturgical year from Ash Wednesday to Easter. The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer – through prayer, repentance, almsgiving and self-denial – for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the Death and...
and on the last three days of the carnival." There are dances from 1788, 1789, and 1791; none date from 1790 because the Emperor was ill and died February 20 of that year.
Minuet
The minuetMinuet
A minuet, also spelled menuet, is a social dance of French origin for two people, usually in 3/4 time. The word was adapted from Italian minuetto and French menuet, and may have been from French menu meaning slender, small, referring to the very small steps, or from the early 17th-century popular...
was slightly old-fashioned by Mozart's time. It was of aristocratic origin, elegant and stately. Mozart wrote his minuets in ternary form
Ternary form
Ternary form, sometimes called song form, is a three-part musical form, usually schematicized as A-B-A. The first and third parts are musically identical, or very nearly so, while the second part in some way provides a contrast with them...
; that is, first the minuet proper, then a contrasting trio section, followed by a return of the minuet.
Mozart also wrote a great number of minuets intended for listening rather than dancing: they occur (usually as the third of four movements) in his symphonies, string quartets, and many other works. These minuets are usually longer, faster in tempo and less regular in their phrasing than the minuets meant for dancing.
German dance
The German dance originated with the lower social classes. It was much livelier than the minuet and to some degree resembled the waltzWaltz
The waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in time, performed primarily in closed position.- History :There are several references to a sliding or gliding dance,- a waltz, from the 16th century including the representations of the printer H.S. Beheim...
. The close physical contact between the dancers, together with constant spinning resulting in dizziness, led this dance to be attacked as immoral. It was nonetheless danced widely. Mozart's German dances are, like the minuets, in ternary form, but normally with a coda
Coda (music)
Coda is a term used in music in a number of different senses, primarily to designate a passage that brings a piece to an end. Technically, it is an expanded cadence...
added. Abert notes that the coda "in most cases relates back to the final dance and frequently includes all manner of orchestral jokes". For an example of the German dances, see Three German Dances
Three German Dances (Mozart)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Three German Dances , K. 605, are a set of three dance pieces composed by Mozart in 1791.-History and the other German Dances:...
, K. 605.
Contredanse
The contredanse was a form descended from English Country DanceEnglish Country Dance
English Country Dance is a form of folk dance. It is a social dance form, which has earliest documented instances in the late 16th century. Queen Elizabeth I of England is noted to have been entertained by "Country Dancing," although the relationship of the dances she saw to the surviving dances of...
. Like its ancestor, it was rich in figures (individual movements and patterns) and was popular among all social classes.
Mozart composed contredanses as a sequence of multiple sections. They sometimes quote popular melodies; for instance, K. 609 quotes the aria "Non piu andrai" from Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro
Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata , K. 492, is an opera buffa composed in 1786 in four acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro .Although the play by...
.
Of the three genres, minuets predominate in Mozart's early career, the latter two types later on.
Instrumentation
The core instrumentation of the dances is a simplified orchestra in which there are no violas, and the bass instruments (cello and double bass) play the same line. A variety of wind instruments is usually included, and often trumpets and timpani. To these basic instruments a few dances add additional instruments not ordinarily found in the orchestra of Mozart's time: fifeFife
Fife is a council area and former county of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries to Perth and Kinross and Clackmannanshire...
and drum
Drum
The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments, which is technically classified as the membranophones. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with the player's hands, or with a...
, tambourine
Tambourine
The tambourine or marine is a musical instrument of the percussion family consisting of a frame, often of wood or plastic, with pairs of small metal jingles, called "zils". Classically the term tambourine denotes an instrument with a drumhead, though some variants may not have a head at all....
, tuned sleighbell
Jingle bell
A jingle bell is a type of bell which produces a distinctive 'jingle' sound, especially in large numbers. They find use in many areas as a percussion instrument, including the classic sleigh bell sound and morris dancing...
s, the hurdy gurdy
Hurdy gurdy
The hurdy gurdy or hurdy-gurdy is a stringed musical instrument that produces sound by a crank-turned rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. The wheel functions much like a violin bow, and single notes played on the instrument sound similar to a violin...
, the post horn
Post horn
The post horn is a valveless cylindrical brass or copper instrument with cupped mouthpiece, used to signal the arrival or departure of a post rider or mail coach...
, and the flageolet
Flageolet
The flageolet is a woodwind musical instrument and a member of the fipple flute family. Its invention is ascribed to the 16th century Sieur Juvigny in 1581. There are two basic forms of the instrument: the French, having four finger holes on the front and two thumb holes on the back; and the...
, which was the piccolo
Piccolo
The piccolo is a half-size flute, and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. The piccolo has the same fingerings as its larger sibling, the standard transverse flute, but the sound it produces is an octave higher than written...
of Mozart's day.
The later dances, which were commercially successful (see below) were retranscribed for other instruments such as piano so that people could play them at home. These transcriptions are usually not the work of Mozart himself.
Composition
As Flothuis observes, Mozart's dances are generally written strictly in eight- and sixteen-bar phrases, reflecting their function as dance music. They also tend to use a restricted harmonic vocabulary.Mozart evidently was able to compose dances very rapidly. His biographer Georg Nikolaus von Nissen
Georg Nikolaus von Nissen
Georg Nikolaus von Nissen was a Danish diplomat and music historian...
narrated an episode from Mozart's visit to Prague in early 1787. In the version given by Abert (2007), Mozart had promised to Count Johann Pachta a set of contredanses. But "his failure to produce these pieces prompted the count to summon him to his home an hour before the meal and to give him writing materials with the instructions that he write the dances there and then as they were to be performed that very day. By the time that the meal had started, nine dances for full orchestra had been completed in full score." Nissen elsewhere relates a similar tale of Mozart composing four fully orchestrated contredanses in less than half an hour; a similar pace.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mozart seems to have felt that the composition of dances was not very challenging: he once said that his pay as imperial chamber composer was "too much for what I do, too little for what I could do."
Reception
Mozart's dances, particularly those composed in his official capacity at the Imperial court, were popular. They were generally printed shortly after their appearance, and according to Solomon the income from the dances partly helped Mozart in recovering from the financial distress into which he had fallen in the later 1780s. In later years they were frequently reprinted.Today, however, it seems that the dances are little performed or recorded, at least in comparison to other Mozart works such as the mature symphonies or concertos. Nevertheless, they are praised by critics. Alex Ross has written of the dances (2006), "They are exasperating to listen to in large quantity, but they are full of lively, even zany details, and serve as a reminder that eighteenth-century composers were expected to be adept at producing both 'popular' and 'serious' music, and that there was no categorical difference between the two.". Abert (2007) wrote, "the most striking aspect of these dances is their almost literally inexhaustible fund of invention. Although their form offers only limited scope for experimentation, each dance differs from the others." Lindmayr-Brandl (2006) writes that "[the dances] that are accessible today, brought to life in the concert hall or in recordings, represent a precious treasure, the immediate expression of the joy of life."
Dance in Mozart's operas
Mozart included a substantial balletBallet
Ballet is a type of performance dance, that originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, and which was further developed in France and Russia as a concert dance form. The early portions preceded the invention of the proscenium stage and were presented in large chambers with...
at the end of his opera Idomeneo
Idomeneo
Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante is an Italian language opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto was adapted by Giambattista Varesco from a French text by Antoine Danchet, which had been set to music by André Campra as Idoménée in 1712...
(1781); he was going against precedent at the time to write the ballet music himself rather than delegating it to another composer.
The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro
Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata , K. 492, is an opera buffa composed in 1786 in four acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro .Although the play by...
(1786) includes a crucial dance scene in which Susanna passes a feigned love note to Count Almaviva during a fandango
Fandango
Fandango is a lively couple's dance, usually in triple metre, traditionally accompanied by guitars and castanets or hand-clapping . Fandango can both be sung and danced. Sung fandango is usually bipartite: it has an instrumental introduction followed by "variaciones"...
. The dance scene was one resisted by the theatrical management at the premiere, and Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte
Lorenzo Da Ponte
Lorenzo Da Ponte was a Venetian opera librettist and poet. He wrote the librettos for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's greatest operas, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte....
prevailed only with difficulty in including it.
Perhaps the most elaborate dance scene in Mozart's operas is a party scene at the end of the first act of Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and with an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the Teatro di Praga on October 29, 1787...
(1787): guests at his party dance three dances simultaneously, each to its own music in interlocking rhythm. As Lindmayr-Brandl (2006) describes it, the dances are assigned to characters systematically: the social class of each character is matched with the traditional class associations of his or her dance. Thus "the representatives of the nobility —Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, Don Ottavio, with Don Giovanni— begin a minuet, then Don Giovanni invites [the peasant girl] Zerlina to dance a contradanse; and finally the servant Leporello dances a German Dance with the peasant Masetto."
Mozart as dancer
Mozart was taught to dance when he was a small child. His first public appearance as a performer was at age five, when he danced in the Latin play "Sigismundus Rex", put on to celebrate the end of the academic year in Salzburg (1 and 3 September 1761). (His public career as an instrumental performer began only a few months later.) In 1770 (age 14), he wrote a letter to his sister NannerlMaria Anna Mozart
Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart , nicknamed "Nannerl", was a musician, the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and daughter of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart.-Childhood:...
from Italy, reporting that "my sole amusement at the moment consists of English [contredanse] steps, and Capriol and spaccat."
Concerning the adult Mozart, biographer Nissen
Georg Nikolaus von Nissen
Georg Nikolaus von Nissen was a Danish diplomat and music historian...
reported "he passionately loved dancing, and missed neither the public masked balls in the theatre, nor his friends' domestic balls. And he danced very well indeed, particularly the minuet." Nissen was presumably relying here on the testimony of Mozart's wife Constanze
Constanze Mozart
Constanze Mozart was the wife of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.-Early years:Constanze Weber was born in Zell im Wiesental. Her mother was Cäcilia Weber, née Stamm. Her father Fridolin Weber worked as a "double bass player, prompter and music copyist." Fridolin's half-brother was the father of composer...
, whom he married some years after Mozart's death. Another report comes from Mozart's friend the tenor Michael Kelly, who in his Reminiscences wrote, "as great as Mozart's genius was, he was an enthusiast in dancing, and often said that his taste lay in that art, rather than in music."
At least as far as one of his letters indicates, Mozart preferred dancing with partners who could match his own ability. On 6 October 1777 he wrote to his father Leopold
Leopold Mozart
Johann Georg Leopold Mozart was a German composer, conductor, teacher, and violinist. Mozart is best known today as the father and teacher of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and for his violin textbook Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule.-Childhood and student years:He was born in Augsburg, son of...
from Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
(where he was searching for employment), and reported:
- "There was dancing, but I only danced four minuets, and by 11 I was back in my room; because with all those girls there, there was only one who could dance in time with the beat, and that was Mademoiselle Käser."
Mozart had many opportunities to go dancing in his place and time, as ballroom dancing was extremely popular. In addition, during his youth his own family hosted dancing in their home in Salzburg. In 1773, Leopold moved the Mozart family from their lodgings in the Getreidegasse
Getreidegasse
Getreidegasse is a busy shopping street in the Old-Town section of Salzburg. The house at no. 9 Getreidegasse is the place where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born and where he lived until the age of 17...
, where Wolfgang and Nannerl had been born, to larger new quarters in the Dancing Master's House (German Tanzmeisterhaus). These rooms, formerly occupied by a dancing teacher, included a fairly large hall which the Mozarts used for dances (as well as concerts and other activities).
In 1783, after his move to Vienna, Mozart himself hosted a ball, despite the somewhat cramped quarters he occupied with his wife Constanze (three rooms). The event is recorded in a letter he wrote to Leopold (22 January 1783):
- "Last week I gave a ball in my own rooms; – but it goes without saying that the young beaux paid 2 florins each; we began at 6 in the evening and stopped at 7 – what? only an hour? – no, no – at seven in the morning."
The letter goes on to explain that the ball was held in large empty rooms adjacent to the Mozarts' own apartment, and was well attended.
External links
Scores for the dancesPerformances on line
Contredanses
- K. 534, 'Das Donnerwetter'
- K.607 'Il trionfo delle donne'
- Five contredanses, K. 609
- K.610 'Les Filles malicieuses'
German dances