Of Mozart’s considerable number of works for violin and orchestra—five violin concertos, several orchestral serenades that include violin-concerto movements, some separate violin-concerto movements, the Sinfonia concertante (violin and viola solo), and a sinfonia concertante torso—most were composed in Salzburg between 1773 and 1775. It was long thought that the nineteen-year old Mozart wrote all five of his violin concertos in 1775, and though Nos. 2 through 5 belong to that year, the First most likely dates from two years earlier.

Mozart may or may not have written his violin concertos with himself in mind as soloist. An accomplished violinist, he is known to have played them on occasion, as did Antonio Brunetti, concertmaster of the Salzburg orchestra. The oft-repeated suggestion that they were actually written for Brunetti seems unlikely, though, because he only came to that post in 1776.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Fifth Concerto’s first movement is the sudden unexpected Adagio where the solo violin makes its first entrance—one might have expected here a return to the main material or a flourish leading into it. This constitutes only one of the many surprises with which the first and last movements abound. The brief development is remarkable in its succession of minor tonalities.

The lovely slow movement was apparently replaced at one time by another, K. 261, which Mozart wrote for the aforementioned Brunetti who “found the other one too studied.” Whether or not a vogue for including this E major movement ever flourished (it’s now often performed separately), the original Adagio has been the one played by subsequent generations of musicians. It is a more extensive slow movement than in any of his other violin concertos, worked out in full sonata form.

It is the finale that gives the Concerto its traditional nickname “Turkish.” When Mozart wrote about “Turkish” music to his father Leopold, chiefly in connection with his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, he meant a certain type of music accompanied by cymbals, bass drum, and triangle, and music that made liberal use of minor keys and generally entered at a loud dynamic level. The “Turkish” music in this Concerto consists of an outburst in the finale in A minor. Mozart scholar Neal Zaslaw has determined that Mozart was most likely to have encountered what he called “Turkish” music—actually Hungarian and Gypsy music from the areas close to the Ottoman Empire—through Michael Haydn, brother of Joseph, who was Mozart’s elder colleague in Salzburg. Michael Haydn had worked in Hungary and had included certain “Turkish” elements in his own music.

Mozart borrowed the “Turkish” theme in his finale from himself: he had used it before in his ballet Le gelosie del serraglio (Jealousy in the Harem), written in December 1772 for a Milan performance of his opera Lucio Silla. The form of the finale is intriguing: a rondo within a rondo. The “Turkish” section is actually a little rondo in itself thus making this central episode longer than any of the others between the statements of the refrain.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe