Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 07/24/2019, uploaded on 11/12/2019

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

In 1777, a twenty-one-year-old and newly unemployed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart set off across Europe to find work. At first, his travels were marked more by the delights of spending money and falling in love (with, as it happened, the sister of the woman he would eventually marry) than by the serious business of the job search. But by the time he landed in Paris in 1778, life was less cheery. He was still unemployed, and money was running short. His newly composed “Paris” Symphony saw just one performance, and the count who commissioned his Concerto for Flute and Harp never paid him the promised fee. Meanwhile, his mother, traveling with him, fell ill and died. During this period of frustration and grief, Mozart wrote a set of Sonatas for Violin and Piano, among them the Violin Sonata in E minor, K. 304. The sonata is his only work in that key and comprises an unusual two-movement structure. A haunting unison opening theme sets the somber tone of the first movement. Later, the second movement’s major-mode middle section takes the music into a realm of incredible tenderness, only to return to the wistful E minor for the sonata’s close.      Notes by Tara Lynn Ramsey

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.