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

Das Traumbild, K.530

Ridente la calma, K.152

Der Zauberer, K.472

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 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 French ariettes were written for Augusta Wendling, daughter of the flautist Johann Baptist Wendling with whom he 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 is unmistakably characteristic of Mozart in the melodic line,