Mozart - Symphony No. 41 in C, K. 551 [complete] (Jupiter)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, on 10 August 1788.
It was the last symphony that he composed.
The work is nicknamed the Jupiter Symphony. This name stems not from Mozart but rather was likely coined by the impresario Johann Peter Salomon in an early arrangement for piano. The symphony is scored for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns in C, two trumpets in C, timpani in C and G, and strings. The 41st Symphony is the last of a set of three that Mozart composed in rapid succession during the summer of 1788. The 39th was completed 26 June and the 40th 25 July. Around the same time, Mozart was writing his piano trios in E and C major, his sonata facile, and a violin sonatina. It is not known whether the 41st Symphony was ever performed in the composer's lifetime. According to Otto Erich Deutsch, around this time Mozart was preparing to hold a series of "Concerts in the Casino" in a new casino in the Spiegelgasse owned by Philipp Otto. Mozart even sent a pair of tickets for this series to his friend Michael Puchberg. But it seems impossible to determine whether the concert series was held, or was cancelled for lack of interest. The four movements are arranged in the traditional symphonic form of the Classical era:
1. Allegro vivace, 4/4
2. Andante cantabile, 3/4 in F major
3. Menuetto: Allegretto - Trio, 3/4
4. Molto allegro, 2/2
In an article about the Jupiter Symphony, Sir George Grove wrote that "it is for the finale that Mozart has reserved all the resources of his science, and all the power, which no one seems to have possessed to the same degree with himself, of concealing that science, and making it the vehicle for music as pleasing as it is learned. Nowhere has he achieved more." Of the piece as a whole, he wrote that "It is the greatest orchestral work of the world which preceded the French Revolution." Scholars are certain Mozart studied Michael Haydn's Symphony No. 28 in C major, which also has a fugato in its finale. Charles Sherman speculates that Mozart also studied the younger Haydn's Symphony No. 39 in C major because he "often requested his father Leopold to send him the latest fugue that Haydn had written." The Michael Haydn No. 39, written only a few weeks before Mozart's, also has a fugato in the finale, the theme of which begins with two whole notes. Sherman has pointed out other similarities between the two almost perfectly contemporaneous works. The four-note motif is also the main theme of the contrapuntal finale of Michael's elder brother Joseph's Symphony No. 13 in D major (1764).