(Duration: 8 min)

With both of her grandfathers working as church musicians and both of her parents singing in the choir of Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, it was no surprise that Mabel Daniels took to music. Her childhood piano lessons led to her making up her own pieces by the age of ten, and her strong singing voice carried her into her college years at Radcliffe, where she performed with the glee club and wrote and conducted her own operettas. After graduating magna cum laude, she sought out private composition lessons with George Chadwick, a central figure in what has come to be known as the “Second New England School” of composers. Daniels then continued her studies in Munich, where her clutch sightreading at the piano (in front of a room full of skeptical male peers, no less) led to her being the first woman admitted to the conservatory’s score-reading class.

Daniels returned to Boston, and for a time was the head of the music department at Simmons College. The epicenter of her composing became the MacDowell Colony, an artist retreat in New Hampshire established by the widow of composer Edward MacDowell. Daniels spent 24 summers there, and the lush surroundings inspired her most famous composition, the tone poem Deep Forest. She wrote the original version in 1932 for the Little Symphony directed by the eminent flutist Georges Barrère, and she added an alternate version for full orchestra the next year. The musical language shows off Daniels’ colorful and muscular approach to harmony that stayed with her from the early years of the twentieth century, influenced by the likes of Debussy and Richard Strauss, and the scoring for one of each woodwind and brass instrument encouraged her to showcase the individualism of the featured players.

Aaron Grad ©2023

Just a year after his move to Vienna, Mozart was “up to his eyes in work” during the whirlwind summer of 1782, as he explained in a letter to his father. He had just prepared the opera Abduction from the Seraglio for its premiere, and he was rushing to arrange the score for winds. (“Otherwise someone will beat me to it and secure the profits instead of me,” he wrote.) He also moved houses, and he was arranging his wedding to Constanze Weber on the sly without tipping off his disapproving father quite yet.

In the midst of all this activity, Leopold asked his son to write music for the ennoblement of Sigmund Haffner, a boyhood chum of Wolfgang’s and the son of the Salzburg Burgomaster. Mozart completed a first movement within a week, and he dispatched subsequent movements as quickly as he could in the following weeks, not even making copies to keep himself. With an introductory march, an extra minuet movement and a smaller woodwind complement, the resulting work was a typical Serenade—a form of music intended as jovial background music for an evening gathering.

No evidence remains of a Salzburg performance of that Serenade (not to be confused with the other Serenade known as the “Haffner,” written for an earlier wedding in the family), but Mozart remembered the score when he was preparing music for a self-produced concert, and he asked his father to send back the manuscript. When it arrived months later, Mozart replied, “My new Haffner symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every single note of it. It must surely produce a good effect.”

To convert the serenade into a symphony, Mozart added flutes and clarinets to the outer movements and dropped the introductory March and superfluous Minuet. From the outset, with its regal leaps up an octave and resonant blasts from the brass and timpani, this symphony’s festive roots shine through. Mozart probably went too far for a Serenade in his finale, with all its boisterous humor, rude surprises and drama worthy of the operatic stage. However it landed on provincial Salzburg’s upper crust, it was a hit with the discerning crowd at Vienna’s Burgtheater.

Aaron Grad ©2018