Masterpieces for Harmonie 

Between 1770 and 1830 many wealthy patrons and nobles in German-speaking lands employed a wind ensemble, often pairs of oboes and/or clarinets, horns and bassoons. Harmonien were status symbols, particularly after the Austrian Emperor formed his own eight-part ensemble around 1782.

Arrangements, very much part of Viennese musical culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were central to Harmoniemusik. And “arrangement” was not a dirty word: re-workings were considered as valid parallel versions of the original. Josef Triebensee, who played oboe in the premiere of Mozart’s Magic Flute and chamber music with Beethoven, was the most important arranger of Harmoniemusik, and his selection of numbers from Don Giovanni expertly mixes the dramatic with the lyrical.

Mozart’s C minor Serenade is unique: rather than the lighter tone of most Harmoniemusik it has a dark, dramatic intensity, and its beautiful, complex contrapuntal writing all set it well outside the norm. The extreme difficulty of the writing has been taken as a clue that it might have been written for the Emperor’s own wind octet, which consisted of the very finest players in Vienna.

Hummel’s Partita is a perfect essay in the form, combining exemplary wind writing in the divertimento tradition with the rich melodic language of his late-Classical style, demonstrating a compositional prowess that in his lifetime saw him ranked alongside Mozart and his life-long friend, Beethoven.

And Beethoven’s own Partita dates initially from his youth at the court of the Emperor’s brother in Bonn – the high opus number is a fiction to make the work appear as if written later in his life – but the composer thought highly enough of the work that he reworked it for string quintet as his opus 4, and it is quintessential Beethoven, particularly in the very scherzo-like third movement.