Description
Mozart wrote his Serenade No. 10 for winds, K. 361 (370a) in the early 1780s. It’s often known by the nickname Gran partita but that name wasn’t given by Mozart. It is scored for 12 wind instruments (pairs of oboes, clarinets, basset horns and bassoons, and four horns) and double bass.
For two hundred years it was relatively unknown outside woodwind circles but that all changed when the work’s third movement (Adagio) was used in the 1984 film Amadeus. Based on Peter Shaffer’s play of the same name the film follows the fictional rivalry between Mozart and Italian composer Antonio Salieri. Salieri idolised Mozart’s genius but when he finally meets him he is profoundly disappointed to find his idol to be silly, obscene and immature. In a scene from later life Salieri recollects hearing the Adagio for the first time, saying:
“On the page it looked nothing…Just a pulse – bassoons and basset-horns – like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly – high above it – an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, until a clarinet took it over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey. This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God. But why would God choose an obscene child to be His instrument?”
The conductor Pierre Boulez described the Adagio as ‘a moment of genius’ – It is, indeed, astonishingly beautiful. In this arrangement for wind quartet and piano the piano takes on most of the syncopated accompaniment, leaving the melodic lines to the remaining players, following much of Mozart’s scoring. This piece would sit very nicely in a recital that included Mozart’s or Beethoven’s Quintet for Piano and Winds.
Also available in a version for wind quintet and piano (i.e. with a flute part).
