Mozart’s Productive Summer

So, what did you get up to over the summer? Perhaps you went on a nice beach holiday somewhere, or sat in front of a fan waiting for the heat to die down, or sipped gins and tonics by the river in the shade of a linden while reading the sonnets of Petrarch. Whatever you did, chances are fairly high that you weren’t holed up in a small room in Vienna composing three of the greatest symphonies in the canon of western music. However that’s pretty much exactly how Mozart spent the summer of 1788; and while the lack of money and fame resulting from his efforts may have caused him to view his summer as a bit of a failure, modern audiences are left to wonder at the casual genius that could bring such masterworks into being in so brief a time. In the years and decades to follow, those three symphonies would become an unassailable part of the…