W. A. MOZART - DIVERTIMENTO K. 136

Mozart’s Divertimento for String Quartet K. 136 was composed in Salzburg in early 1772 when he was just sixteen. It is hard to classify because, while maintaining the spirit of the divertimento, it is divided into three movements, and is thus closer to a symphony in structure. The piece is called a “Divertimento” on the manuscript, but it is impossible for Mozart himself to have written it because of the missing two minuets. It was conceived for a group of musicians that could, depending on the situation, range from a quartet to a string orchestra.

Mozart probably wrote these pieces in preparation for his trip to Italy, so that the writing of the Lucio Silla opera would encounter no snags if several symphonies had been requested.

The first movement is a piece for violin virtuosity, with the instruments competing as in a concert duet; the second movement is full of grace and gallant sweetness, in the Italian fashion; the last movement (which is not an actual rondo), is characterized by a great simplicity of character and, in the beginning, accentuates the counterpoint style.

W. A. MOZART - SERENATA K.525

Einekleine Nachtmusik K. 525 (A Little Night Music). The K. 525 is Mozart’s last serenade, completed in August 1787. Extremely famous and popular, the composition is one of the absolute tops of chamber music of all time, written for strings. Even if it is easy to play, it is an example of perfection and mastery of the use of musical forms.

It is one of the Master’s most enigmatic works; all mystery might be cleared up, perhaps, by admitting that he wrote it only for himself, to satisfy an interior need, and that it served as a corrective counterpart to the Musiklischer Spass (K.522) that he had composed eight weeks earlier. A sensitive ear like his required that the errors created satirically in K.522 be corrected in the formal perfection of K. 525.

Indeed, for Mozart, as for Bach, every wrong note was an offense to the cosmic system.

The piece is characterized by a light, folksy nature in the succession of its four movements. It opens with an Allegro Festoso full of spirit; it then continues and turns into a pleasant dancing motif. The second movement, the Romanza, is an andante as sweet as a serenade, which seems to lull the listener. The third movement is a minuet, courteous and noble as is fitting for a court dance. The fourth movement, the gay and lively Rondo, closes the opera in an extraordinary atmosphere of lightness and fantasy.

Here we have the most sublime material contained in the smallest package.

O. RESPIGHI - ANTICHE ARIE E DANZE PER LIUTO   (terza serie)

Strauss and Debussy are the artistic godfathers of O. Respighi(1879-1936) who, using the orchestral magnificence of one, and the capacity to create evocative atmospheres of harmony and timbre of the other, created his own type of non-narrative, but rather descriptive symphonic poem imbued with an aestheticizing D’Annunzio-like sensuality which, in substance, did not seriously compromise the autonomy of the music but, indeed, gave it a strong, full-blooded expansion.

In the early 20^th century an entire generation of composers worked to repropose old court dances and airs in a modern style, seeking to combine archaic languages with new motifs.

The musicologist Oscar Chilesotti published a number of volumes of transcriptions of old lute airs over a thirty-year period: all the pieces were taken from a 15^th-century Lauten-Buch codex. In 1890 he published an anthology, the Lautenspieler des 16 Jaharhunderts.

Respighi, in fact, based himself on these transcriptions for the composition of his famous Ancient Airs and Dances suites which, although created for the simple purpose of re-attracting attention to the Italian wealth of instruments, then took the form of a parodic rethinking of the 16^th-century tradition close to Stravinsky’s Pulcinella or Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony.

In the Third Suite of the Ancient Airs and Dances, Respighi reworks for a strong orchestra several 16^th- and 17^th-century dances originally written for the lute, the principal instrument of the musical life of Renaissance courts and palaces. We will hear luminous, refined pages, from the fluttering Italiana to the Arie di corte which vary between the intensity of the song and the fun of the dance, from the impassioned Siciliana with its characteristic rhythm suspended over the staccato of the strings of the vigorous closing Passacaglia.

B. BARTOK - DANZE RUMENE

Bartók’s interest in folk music is seen in both his systematic studies on the authentic peasant roots of Hungarian folklore, and in its reworking and re-creation in his activity as a composer. In this activity there is a close interweaving of ideal and practical, formal and linguistic reasons that come together and complete each other, bringing about a fertile enrichment of the vital resources in the musical field. Although this acquisition and transformation process took place for innovative needs not foreign to a precise national conscience, it is significant that Bartók intended them mainly as bases for his creative work and proclaimed the desire to humbly serve the ideal of “the brotherhood of peoples, brotherhood in spite of all wars and conflicts”; however because of this, and precisely by virtue of an attitude that appears exemplary to us today, he drew the criticism and misunderstanding of the very persons whom he meant to address with his study and emancipation of native folk music.

Each of the seven dances has a title that defines its nature and intended use. Thus we have, in this order, Stick Dance, Sash Dance, In One Spot, Horn Dance, Romanian polka, Fast Dance (from Belényes), and Fast Dance (from Nyàgra).