Three German Dances, K.605 (“Sleighbell Dances”)

The transitional status of the German dance, the predecessor of the waltz, as it entered high society towards the end of the eighteenth century is neatly symbolised in the ball scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, where the aristocratic Giovanni and the peasant Zerlina find that it is one thing they have in common. Towards the end of his life, as official chamber musician to the court in Vienna, Mozart supplied numerous dances for masked balls in the Redoutensaal, many of them German dances. Though slower and obviously more formal than the Viennese waltz, the German dance could benefit too from a little novelty in its scoring and its title - as the middle section of the third of these three dances so delightfully demonstrates: headed “Sleighride” it glides along on an legato melody accompanied by the jingle of bells tuned to five different pitches.