A Memorial Concert for Mozart in Hamburg on 19 Feb 1792
Posted: Wed, 21 Dec 2016
We have just added two new documents to our site; both are reports on a memorial concert for Mozart in Hamburg on 19 Feb 1792. Although these reports have been known since at least 1890, they are not in Dokumente or its supplements, and the concert has received little attention in the Mozart literature. The concert is of exceptional interest, however, because the program consisted entirely of music by Mozart and much of the program can be reconstructed: it consisted of a piano concerto (K. 595 or K. 456), the aria K. 505, a cantata (K. 471 or K. 619), and three symphonies, including, at the conclusion of the program, the Symphony in E-flat, K. 543, currently the earliest documented performance of that work.
The concert is also evidence of the unusually strong affection for Mozart’s music in Hamburg that had developed over the preceding five years, motivated in part by the director of the German theater in Hamburg, Friedrich Schröder, whose own interest in Mozart’s music had probably been sparked during his time as a member of the court theater ensemble in Vienna from 1781 to 1785.
A report in the Staats- und Gelehrte Zeitung des Hamburgischen unpartheyischen Correspondenten on 22 Feb 1792.
A personal reaction to the concert from a writer identified as “Iwan Anderwitsch,” published in the Musikalische Korrespondenz. The item includes Anderwitsch’s expression of his and the audience’s awe on hearing the magnificent and unprecedented Symphony in E-flat for the first time.