Mozart. The Last Three Symphonies

There are three of them, like Beethoven's last sonatas, and, like those works, they mark the end of the matter. The composer will not go any further. In 1788, Mozart completed his symphonic journey. At the age of thirty-two, he made way for Haydn, thirty years his glorious elder. Haydn was to throw the musical world off-centre, making clear that it was not restricted to Vienna. It was to London that he offered, seven years after the 'Jupiter', four years after Mozart's death, his last group of three. With his Symphony no.104, the 'London', ended a long fecundity, in which we may see Haydn, quite literally, burying Mozart.

Did Mozart ever hear this group of three works after which he laid down his pen as a symphonist? Were they written in response to a commission? We do not know. Or did they perhaps respond, rather, to a desire for exorcism, the urge to be rid of the Classical symphony and its manners, which, for a spirit as free, as inventive as Mozart, were constraints just like the com-mands of his archbishop? Where was Mozart coming from when he began work on his last three symphonies? From the opera house. After Figaro, he wrote Don Giovanni; and Così fan tutte was on its way. Now, when Don Giovanni was born in Prague on 29 October 1787, something happened that even Mozart could not have dreamed of.