Mozart and dance
The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a great deal of dance music, both for public use and as elements of larger works such as operas, quartets, and symphonies.
[2] Following his move to Vienna, the pace of dance music composition increased, as on 7 December 1787 Mozart was appointed Royal and Imperial Chamber Composer for Emperor Joseph II.
This post, though largely a sinecure,[a] had as its main duty the composition of dances for the balls held in the Redoutensälen (public ballrooms) of the Imperial Palace.
[5] Mozart also wrote a great number of minuets intended for listening rather than dancing: they occur (usually as the third of four movements) in his symphonies, string quartets, and many other works.
The close physical contact between the dancers, together with constant spinning causing dizziness, led this dance to be attacked as immoral.
Abert notes that the coda "in most cases relates back to the final dance and frequently includes all manner of orchestral jokes".
His biographer Georg Nikolaus von Nissen narrated an episode from Mozart's visit to Prague in early 1787.
They were generally printed shortly after their appearance, and according to Solomon the income from the dances partly helped Mozart to recover from the financial distress into which he had fallen in the later 1780s.
Alex Ross has written of the dances (2006), "They are exasperating to listen to in large quantity, but they are full of lively, even zany details, and serve as a reminder that eighteenth-century composers were expected to be adept at producing both 'popular' and 'serious' music, and that there was no categorical difference between the two.".
[14] The Marriage of Figaro (1786) includes a crucial dance scene in which Susanna passes a feigned love note to Count Almaviva during a fandango.
The dance scene was one resisted by the theatrical management at the premiere, and Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte prevailed only with difficulty in including it.
His first public appearance as a performer[15] was at age five, when he danced in the Latin play "Sigismundus Rex", put on to celebrate the end of the academic year in Salzburg (1 and 3 September 1761).
)[17] In 1770 (age 14), he wrote a letter to his sister Nannerl from Italy, reporting that "my sole amusement at the moment consists of English [contredanse] steps, and Capriol and spaccat.
In 1773, Leopold moved the Mozart family from their lodgings in the Getreidegasse, where Wolfgang and Nannerl had been born, to larger new quarters in the Dancing Master's House (German Tanzmeisterhaus).
[20] The event is recorded in a letter he wrote to Leopold (22 January 1783): Last week I gave a ball in my own rooms; – but it goes without saying that the young beaux paid 2 florins each; we began at 6 in the evening and stopped at 7 – what?
[g]The letter goes on to explain that the ball was held in large empty rooms adjacent to the Mozarts' own apartment, and was well attended.
