It was on this day in 1788 that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered into his catalog the completion of one of his most beloved works, and my favorite of his works, the Symphony Number 40 in G Minor. It was written in the final years of Mozart’s life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever heard any of these symphonies performed.
It has been argued that these were conceived as a single piece, since the middle one, #40, does not really have an introduction or a real finale.
Pianist and music scholar Charles Rosen (in his book The Classical Style) has called the symphony "a work of passion, violence, and grief." That certainly would have appealed to Beethoven, who copied out 29 bars from the score in one of his sketchbooks. The copied bars appear amid the sketches for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, whose third movement begins with a pitch sequence similar to that of Mozart's finale. Franz Schubert likewise copied out the music of Mozart's minuet, and the minuet of his Fifth Symphony strongly evokes Mozart's. A passage late in Joseph Haydn's oratorio The Seasons, a meditation on death, quotes the second movement of the 40th Symphony and was included by Haydn as a memorial to his long-dead friend.
The 40th symphony exists in two versions, differing primarily in that one includes parts for a pair of clarinets (with suitable adjustments made in the other wind parts). Most likely, the clarinet parts were added in a revised version. The autograph scores of both versions were acquired in the 1860s by Johannes Brahms, who later donated the manuscripts to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, where they reside today.
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