Symphony No. 33 in B-flat, K.319

Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who began calling himself Wolfgango Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè in 1777, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He completed his Symphony No. 33 on July 9, 1779, in Salzburg; the undocumented first performance almost certainly took place soon after. The original autograph manuscript included only three movements; he added the Menuetto six years later when he presented the piece in Vienna.

The score for the Symphony No. 33 calls for 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). The symphony is about 20 minutes long.

Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 33 in the summer of 1779 during what most interpret as an intensely frustrating period in his life. Feeling stifled and unappreciated in his hometown of Salzburg, where he chafed in the service of the infelicitous and imperious Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, in 1777 Mozart embarked with his mother on a sixteen-month trip that took him to Munich, Mannheim, and Paris. The goal was to find a well-paying position that would offer him an escape route from the Salzburg’s musical doldrums. Paris in particular was a terrible experience: his mother died while they were there, in July 1778, and artistically he found both the music and the milieu distasteful.

Mozart served out his sentence in Salzburg until he was dismissed in June 1781 and free to relocate to Vienna, where he met with some success as an independent composer of piano concertos and opera. During those final two years in Salzburg he wrote only three symphonies (really more like two-and-half, with the single-movement work referred to as No. 32 more properly considered an overture), compared with the twenty or so he wrote there between 1771 and 1775. And though he had steadier output in other genres—his Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola, K.364, comes from this stretch—his public performances in Salzburg during this period were noticeably reduced from his earlier years; several featured older works simply reheated for the occasion. He also abandoned work on a Singspiel (later known as Zaide), turning his attention again out-of-town, back to Munich, which had ordered up the opera Idomeneo. Was Mozart “quiet quitting”?

The cheerful and buoyant energy of the Symphony No. 33 belies this notion. Even if we imagine Mozart to have been annoyed at having to scale back his orchestration to the modest forces made available by the penurious Archbishop—while his Symphony No. 31 written for Paris luxuriated in twice the wind instruments and a timpani—one cannot argue that this dims the light of the work. Nor did Mozart have to abandon the cosmopolitan techniques he acquired during his travels. In the first twenty-four bars Mozart establishes an atmosphere of elegance and equilibrium though the well-proportioned use of full-orchestra passages, tiptoeing scales, gossamer chromaticism, and negative space (silence). But then he launches us forward into what will become a pervasive rhythmic energy, using two techniques borrowed from the symphonic style in Mannheim: jarring forte-piano dynamic effects (loud and then suddenly soft) and the so-called “Mannheim roller” in which a melodic figure dramatically rises over a repeated bass note.

The contrast between passages like the Mannheim roller, where we seem to be “headed somewhere,” and the opening, where we seem to “be somewhere,” offer a road map within the context of the movement’s sonata form—the structure of which, codified later by theorists, was still developing during this time and which became the most important musical form of the Classical era. It’s when we “are somewhere,” in the sonata form’s exposition that we meet the important tunes (themes) that will return (either near-verbatim in the recapitulation or in altered form in the development) throughout the work. The next such tune we meet here is an oscillating figure in the winds answers a gentle downward zigzag in the violins. There follows another tune from the violins, cast again in short bow stokes, and introducing a trill figure that foretells Mozart’s pointillistic use of that ornament later on—including some especially fiery ones from the cellos and basses.

The strings act as the main character in the second movement (Andante moderato), the winds mainly deployed as accent pieces—twice, the oboe hangs high above the melody like an ethereal ornament. The two main themes contrast in contour, the first more disjunct, with wider intervallic leaps, while the second one, set against sustained winds, moves stepwise, even as it rises and falls—different terrains, but both offering a beautiful landscape. In the movement’s central section, we encounter a brief passage of almost Baroque counterpoint, first in the strings and then echoed by the winds. To close the movement, the two main themes appear again, though this time in reverse order.

This symphony as originally written had only three movements. Mozart added the Minuet and Trio six years after the fact in Vienna, where four-movement symphonies were the norm, a tidy metaphor for the opportunity for “growth” that Vienna held for Mozart. In the Finale, Mozart demonstrates that he’s not missing those six wind instruments or the timpani he left in Paris—the sense of presence, drama, and energy far outstrip this chamber-sized orchestra. Breakneck triplet figures set the pace, sometimes scurrying, sometimes thundering—Mozart uses unison passages across the ensemble when he really means business. Dotted rhythms (long-short, long-short) characterize both the first and second theme, though more elongated and lyrical in the latter. Where we had a brief glimpse of counterpoint in the second movement, we get a great deal more of it in the development section here. Mozart builds in layers of contrapuntal interlocutors chatting at varying speeds, but just as things seem to be getting interesting, a unison figure across the ensemble interrupts rather rudely to bring on the recapitulation. The movement too ends in an emphatic unison—the people united will never be defeated, at least not by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg.

Michael Nock

Michael Nock is Artistic Administrator of the Boston Pops. Prior to that, he spent over twenty years on the staff of the Tanglewood Music Center, ending his tenure there as Interim Director in 2022. He received his Master of Music in Musicology from Boston University, was a faculty member at Dean College from 2001 to 2005, and has lectured and written on music for a variety of organizations in Boston and beyond.

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance in BSO concerts of Mozart’s Symphony No. 33 in B-flat was led by Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood on July 14, 1946, though members of the BSO performed it in a chamber-concert series under G. Wallace Woodworth’s direction in New England Life Hall at the New England Mutual Life Insurance Building in Boston in August 1944.