Flute Concerto in G major, K.313

When Mozart told his father that the flute is an “instrument which I cannot bear,” he didn’t really mean it. As Leopold Mozart immediately realised, his son was making excuses - he didn’t have time, he wasn’t in the mood, he didn’t like the flute - for failing to fulfil the terms of a commission he had received from an amateur flautist and for losing more than half his fee in consequence. Having been asked by Ferdinand Dejean (a surgeon with the Dutch East India Company) to write three concertos and four quartets, he had written one new Flute Concerto in G, had recycled his Oboe Concerto in C as a Flute Concerto in D, and had completed only two or three of the quartets.

It is clear from the Flute Concerto in G is that even as early as 1778 the future composer of The Magic Flute found more than a little inspiration in the instrument. It is true that the first theme of the Allegro maestoso is no more than a miniature fanfare followed by a descending scale. That, at least, is how the violins introduce it. The flute, on the other hand, has more interesting, more wayward things to do with it, taking it into unexpected tonal areas while endowing it with expressive ornamentation and virtuoso leaps. Indeed, it is the unpredictable temper of the soloist, vacillating between major and minor, that liberates the development section from conventional passage work and makes the recovery of G major for the recapitulation no merely formal event.

It is generally assumed that the reason why Mozart could afford to exclude the two oboes from the orchestra in the slow movement and replace them with flutes is that oboists in his day were expected to play the flute as well. However that may be, the existence of a separate Andante in C major (K.315), scored for solo flute and exactly the same combination of instruments as the first and third movements of this concerto, suggests that he might have been in two minds about the strategy. Anyway, the present Adagio non troppo is much the better movement and, in character if not in sound, more in keeping with the Allegro maestoso. The outer sections are delicately poised in D major on a slender line of chromatic melody and effectively offset by a middle section with a taste for exploring more dramatic minor-key areas.

The last movement (with oboes restored) is a cheerful minuet in rondo

form. Judging by the straightforward nature of the main theme and the conventional harmonies in the first contrasting episode, the wayward tendencies of the flute would seem to have been corrected. But in the second episode it slips into the minor again and from there into a variety of modulations and new melodic improvisations. The return to G major and the recapitulation is made by way of a cadenza, the content of which Mozart left to the taste, skill and imagination of the soloist.

Gerald Larner©