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Menahem Pressler’s acute musical sensitivity gives us an answer to our
musicological questions: the A major Sonata does indeed appear to have been
composed in the wake of
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
, the first opera Mozart
worked on after moving to Vienna, between 1781 and 1782. The immense success of
its first performances led to numerous revivals. Mozart was happy and free at last,
having recently escaped from the deadly tutelage of Salzburg, and no longer had
a patron to whom he owed servile obedience. He married Constanze Weber on 4
August 1782 and their first child was born on 17 June 1783.
Flushed with these recent successes, he spent the following summer in Salzburg
in order to introduce his young wife to his father and sister. And there he reverted,
for this rondomovement in the ‘Turkish’ style, to the idiomof the Janissarymarches
and the overture of his opera: the sudden alternations between the major and
minor modes, the tight, percussive short appoggiaturas, the repetitive formulas
spinning around themselves, the stereotyped accompanying figures, a colourful
piano sound that seems to mingle strident piccolos and jangling triangles and
cymbals . . . The language of ‘Turkery’ is conjured up here – an effect that was at
once amusing and disquieting, since the Janissary armies, which had several times
reached the gates of Vienna, announced their arrival in music that could be heard
from a great distance. Hence the rondo ‘Alla Turca’ carries intrinsically within it
both delight in pure sound in its ludic aspect and an expression of bewildered terror
at impending danger in its incessant repetitions.
MENAHEM PRESSLER 27