Eine kleine Nachtmusik

Mozart finished this serenade in Vienna on 10 August 1787 and wrote it into the catalog he kept of his own works as Eine kleine Nacht-Musick, a little night music. It is scored for two violins, viola, cello and double bass, and it is played now as often by a string orchestra as by five players. Nobody knows why he wrote it, or whether anyone heard it while he was alive. It was published only in 1827, by Johann André in Offenbach, more than thirty years after his death.

His catalog lists five movements: an Allegro, a minuet and trio, a Romance, another minuet and trio, and a finale. Four survive. The first minuet is lost, and the musicologist Alfred Einstein suggested it may be a minuet that turns up in a piano sonata cataloged as K. 498a. The serenade that is left has become one of the most played pieces of classical music there is, and its opening bars are the ones people know.

Those bars are what musicians call a Mannheim rocket, a fast climb up the notes of a chord. Here it goes up the G chord, G, D, G, D, then G, D, G, B, D, and answers itself on the D chord. On a mandolin, an octave below the violin, the whole rocket lives on the D and A courses, starting from the open D. After it comes the phrase that keeps turning on F sharp, and then a soft phrase that walks down from d and comes to rest on G.

Every note here sits in first position, and nothing goes past the fifth fret. What the page asks for is crispness. The rocket's notes are short in the score and a mandolin's are shorter still, so strike each one clean and let the held notes carry through the gaps. Bars 9 and 10 are two quick pairs of repeated notes and a held one, G, G, F sharp, then G, G, A, and they want an even down, up on each pair. Take the middle speed when the first eight bars stop sounding careful.