George Szell, The Cleveland Orchestra Mozart* – Symphonies Nos. 39 & 40 Exsultate, Jubilate

For today’s musicologists, performers and concert-going audiences, Mozart’s final symphonies are still a veritable miracle. Why they were written remains a mystery, and no-one knows whether Mozart ever heard them performed during his lifetime. One thing is certain: Mozart created three individual, distinctive and unique works here, which complement each other despite their extreme diversity.

In the summer of 1788 Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–91) wrote what from any standpoint is an extraordinary set of three symphonies – as Jarno says in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, people “do extraordinary things without respecting orderliness”. It was presumably not Mozart’s intention that this group of symphonies should remain his final word on the subject, and a weighty one at that. Despite every setback, it tells of a time of new departures, not of valediction. Only three years later, during which time he had written many other masterpieces, death snatched the pen from his hand. He was only thirty-five…

Mozart composed some fifty symphonies, if we include works he adapted from opera overtures or serenades by adding movements or taking them away. The first dates from 1764-5, at the time of his childhood visit to London, and most are early works, quite short. Many are associated with his boyhood travels (his first trip to Italy in 1769-71, for instance) but his most prolific period as a symphonist was between 1771 and 1774 when, in Salzburg, he wrote no fewer than seventeen.