Nehmt meinen Dank (Accept my Thanks) K.383

One of Mozart’s favourite singers was the soprano Aloisa Lange. He had actually fallen in love with her when he was staying in Mannheim in 1778 and he went on composing things for her for years after she had rejected him - most of them arias designed to show off a voice of an unusually wide range. Nehmt meinen Dank, which was written just a few weeks before he married Aloisa’s sister Constanze, is a more modest kind of piece intended, as the humbly grateful expression of the text seems to confirm, to thank the audience for its generosity at a concert given for Aloisa’s benefit in Vienna in 1782. While there are opportunities for the soloist to insert cadenzas and to add decorations to the vocal line, if the fancy takes her, it is based on a charmingly unassuming melody with a accompanied by pizzicato strings and attractively coloured by three woodwind soloists.