Wolfgang A. Mozart (1756-1791) Divertimento in D major KV 136 2 Allegro 3 Andante 4 Presto

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was born in Salzburg. He showed an extraordinary talent for music at a very early age. When he was only six years old he performed for the local nobility. Some small concert tours to Munich and Vienna were made in the same period. These trips were successful for the young Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl and therefore a longer tour was made in 1763. They visited Cologne, Paris, London, The Hague, Geneva, Zurich, and many other places and only went back home in 1766. Also important for Mozart's development as a composer were the tours of Italy he made after 1766. During those trips he came to know the Italian music and met Giambattista Martini (1706-1784), a Fransican friar and prominent composer and theoretician, in 1770. Martini showed the highly talented child the characteristics of the Italian style of composing. Mozart achieved great triumphs in his life but he also knew disappointments. His father disapproved of his marriage with Constance Weber and his popularity in Vienna faded rapidly. Fortunately, he was still successful in other cities. When he was in Prague in 1787, his opera Le Nozze di Figaro was cheered so much that he started to write another opera immediately. This work, Don Giovanni, was dedicated to the city of Prague and was praised as much as Le Nozze di Figaro. When he went back to Vienna, however, no success followed and Mozart was forced to use his savings because he did not obtain a permanent appointment. Disappointed, he turned away from the public and its fashions. He composed in a style all of his own during the last few years of his life, the period in which he was in failing health. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in 1791, broke. He was buried the way Vienna's poorest inhabitants were buried those days: as an anonymous citizen in an unknown grave. Mozart composed his Divertimento in D major KV 136 in 1772, when he was barely 15 years old. He wrote two more divertimentos and eight symphonies in the same year. In Mozart's time, a divertimento was a multipartite musical form which was related to the suite. The composition on this CD, however, does not have any minuet, as was common, so that it is a tripartite composition. Because of this and also because the divertimentos KV 136, 137 and 138 are often performed by string orchestras, they are also called 'Streicher Symphonien".

Alex Timmerman ©2000

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