Violin Concerto in A major K.219

Rondeau: tempo di minuetto

“If I have time,” Mozart wrote to his father from Paris in 1778, “I shall rearrange some of my violin concertos and shorten them. In Germany we rather like length but after all it is better to be short and good.” Happily, the composer’s strictures did not prevail. The most interesting aspect of the Violin Concerto in A major - the last, the longest and perhaps the best of the four or five he had written in Salzburg three years earlier - is its diversions from the standard procedures of the day. We do not know who played the solo part in the first performance but it is difficult to discard the notion that, accomplished violinist as he was, he would have wanted to present these inspirations himself.

Mozart might have had his first solo entry with the same material as that offered by the violins in the orchestral exposition. Instead, reacting to the gesture offered by the orchestra in making way for him, the soloist floats into a sweetly lyrical Adagio accompanied by murmuringly acquiescent strings. The main Allegro aperto tempo is soon re-established but again the soloist fails to conform, this time refusing to join the other violins in the re-introduction of the opening theme as he adds his own melodic idea above it. Certainly, this proliferation of themes, like the soloist’s inventive lyrical tendencies in the development, prolongs the construction but at the same time commands fascinated attention. What kind of cadenza Mozart might have improvised in these liberated circumstances it is impossible to imagine.

The Adagio has only one main theme and it seems that it will survive on the melodic beauty of that theme, its facility for generating attracting subsidiary ideas and expressive extensions and variants in both the orchestra and the solo part. It is only half-way through the movement, in a wayward harmonic development, that the soloist turns in a new melodic direction. That short diversion is modest in comparison with a sensational event in the closing Rondeau where the minuet tempo and triple-time metre are pushed aside by an increasingly boisterous “Turkish” episode of exotic harmonies, chromatic melody and aggressive dancing rhythms. This too prolongs the construction but it is difficult to believe that Mozart would have cut if he had ever got round to making his threatened revisions.