Schonbrunn Ensemble Amsterdam - W.A. Mozart: Flute Quartets (1990)

Mozart’s interest in the flute and its players Most sleeve notes about Mozart’s music for the flute begin with a quotation from one of Mozart’s letters to his father, written on the 14th of February 1778, in which he says he ‘could not abide’ the flute. Other letters from that same period tell us that he should have said that his mind was on other things: his beloved Aloyia Weber to be precise. How else could it be that Mozart wrote four flute quartets, two flute concerti, a flute and harp concerto, an Andante for flute and orchestra, the original version of the Sinfonia Concertante, and several solos, such as the flute part in the aria ‘Se it padre perdei’ from the opera Idomeneo. There were in fact three flute players in Mozart’s life who inspired him to write for the instrument, each in his own way – Ferdinand Dejean, a wealthy Dutch amateur flute player who commissioned him to compose ‘three small, light and short concerti and two quartets for the flute’. – Duc de Guines, for whom he wrote the flute and harp concerto, probably knowing that the man played a flute with more than the usual one key, since Mozart asks for a low dflat and c more than once. – Johann Baptiste Wendling, a friend of Mozart and, judging by Mozart’s letters to his father, an excellent flute player, whose playing he held in high esteem. Mozart wrote the now lost flute part in the original version of the Sinfonia Concertante for four winds and orchestra and the flute part in the above mentioned aria from Idomeneo for him….