Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Serenada in G, K 525, comes from a later period of Mozart's life. In 1781 Mozart, who had returned from Mannheim and Paris to the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg, accompanied his patron on a visit to the Imperial capital, Vienna. There he finally broke with his employer and secured his dismissal from the archiepiscopal court. In Vienna there seemed every opportunity, which it seemed his patron was deliberately preventing him from seizing. The last ten years of Mozart's life were spent in Vienna, without the presence of his father to guide him and without the kind of secure patronage that he had hoped to gain at court. An imprudent marriage brought it's own difficulties, but Mozart, nevertheless, won some immediate acclaim, both in the theatre and as a performer on the fortepiano, popularity which waned, but had begun to revive at the time of his sudden death in December, 1791. Eine kleine Nachtmusik was written in August, 1787, a few months after the death of Leopold Mozart in Salzburg, while Mozart was preparing his new opera, Don Giovanni, for performance in Prague The occasion of it's composition is unknown, but the work would have been suitable for domestic performance. Originally including a first Minuet, now lost, the Serenade opens with music as lucid and cheerful as anything Mozart wrote, followed by a Romance of charm and ingenuity, a spry Minuet and a final Rondo, a conclusion to the remarkable series of Serenades and Divertimenti on which Mozart had embarked twenty years before, as a ten-year-old.