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British musicologist Donald Tovey once declared of Mozart’s last symphony: “The title Jupiter takes rank with the titles Emperor Concerto and Moonlight Sonata as among the silliest injuries ever inflicted on great works of art.”
Others, however, are more inclined to cut the symphony (which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform under Marek Janowski on Nov. 4-6) and its alias a little slack. No less than Robert Schumann himself observed: “About many things in this world there is simply nothing to be said — for example, about Mozart’s C Major Symphony, much of Shakespeare and some of Beethoven.”
With that in mind, here are a few grace notes that have been attached over the years to Mozart’s masterpiece.’
What’s in a nickname? Though Symphony No. 41 has been known as “Jupiter” for aeons, Mozart did not dub his symphony as such. Years after the composer’s death, impresario Johann Peter Salomon came up with the sobriquet of “Jupiter” as a catchy tagline for the symphony’s London performances.
The grand finale: Written in 1788, the Jupiter was the last of Mozart’s symphonies — and the longest. Many musicologists consider it one of his greatest: "Certainly it is the loftiest and most magisterial of Mozart’s symphonies," writes Janet E. Bedell, “with a formal and ceremonial quality in keeping with its key of C major.”
Mozart in the movies: In “Manhattan” (1979), TV writer (and age-inappropriate lothario) Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) muses, "Why is life worth living? It’s a very good question. Um, well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Groucho Marx, to name one thing and Willie Mays ... and the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony.“ And Bernstein — Elmer, not Lenny — drew on Mozart for his Oscar-nominated score of the comedy ”Trading Places" (1983), which references the aforementioned second movement of Symphony No. 41.
Divine inspiration: Alexei Maxim Russell’s series of mystery novels about Trueman Bradley, a brilliant detective with Asperger’s syndrome, has a Mozart connection. While he works, Bradley listens to Symphony No. 41 on repeat because it helps him concentrate: “I felt as if the perfectly arranged notes of the music were filling the room with logic and order.”
Take five: The symphony’s final movement, with its use of counterpoint, is considered revolutionary; it expertly weaves together five different melodies simultaneously. “The movement has been celebrated as one of the quintessential examples of craftsmanship in Western music,” observes scholar Richard Atkinson. Mozart’s youngest son, Franz Xaver Wolfgang, insisted that the finale to his father’s Symphony in C was “the highest triumph of instrumental composition.”
