Oiseaux, si tous les ans, K.307 [1777-78]

Das Traumbild, K.530 [1787]

Ridente la calma, K.152 [arr 1772?]

Der Zauberer, K.472 [1785]

Dans un bois solitaire, K.308 [1777-78]

“That would be an everlasting blot on Germany, if we Germans were seriously to begin to think as Germans, to act as Germans, to speak German and, Heaven help us, to sing in German!!” Although he was exercising his irony on behalf of German opera - in a letter addressed to an ambitious librettist in May 1785 - Mozart must have had similar, if less passionate feelings about German song. Indeed, just a few days after he wrote that letter he created what, with some over-simplification, could be claimed as the prototype of the Lied in his folksong-style setting of Goethe’s Das Veilchen, K.476. There was nothing systematic in Mozart’s song writing, however. It was always a casual matter for him, the work of an entertaining hour or so, undertaken in many cases to please a particular singer, whose qualities and tastes - rather than any ambition to set an agenda for the future of German song - would determine the choice of the text and the form and style of the setting.

The two ariettes - rare examples of Mozart in French - were written for Augusta Wendling, daughter of the flautist Johann Baptist Wendling with whom the composer took his meals during his prolonged stop-over in Mannheim on his journey to Paris in 1777 and 1778. Though no more ambitious than a graceful thank-you present, Oiseaux, si tous les ans, sounds like a junior version of an aria for Zerlina. Das Traumbild was written in Prague nine or ten years later in 1787, a few days after the first performance of Don Giovanni at the National Theatre. A true example of the Lied, it transcends in its simplicity the anacreontic fussiness of Hölty’s verse. Ridente la calma is not an original Mozart song but, it is thought, an arrangement by him of a canzonetta by Joseph Myslivecek, whom Mozart met in Bologna in 1770 and again in Milan in 1772. Der Zauberer, one of three Weisse settings written in Vienna in May 1785, is an authentic example of Mozart wit which, far from being inhibited by the strophic construction, makes a positive virtue of it. In comparison with the first French ariette, Dans un bois solitaire is a virtuoso piece, displaying both the composer’s and the singer’s narrative art in the dramatically articulated middle section.