Luogo e data di registrazione		Centre in the Square, Kitchener, Ontario (Canada) - 25/26 Febrauary 1991
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineers		Stephan Schellmann (1-6); Peter Laenger (7-36)
	Editing		Markus Heiland (Tritonus)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Sony / Vivarte - SK 46 696 - (CD) - durata 63' 55" - (p) 1991 - DDD
	Cover Art		Soirée by W. Hogarth (1697-1764) - Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
	Note		-

In the Reminiscences of Mozart's great Irish friend, Michael Kelly, we read: “After [a] splendid performance we sat down to supper, and I had the pleasure to be seated between him [Mozart] and his wife [...]. After supper the young branches of our host had a dance, and Mozart joined them. Madame Mozart told me, that great as his genius was, he was an enthusiast in dancing, and often said that his taste lay in that art, rather than in music.” The German Dances (Deutsche Tänze) on this recording represent Mozart's most typical representations of that art. They were written between 1787 and 1789, a period both of great creativity and also of dramatic disturbances in Mozart's life. On the positive side, he was enjoying a certain fame as the composer of Le Nozze di Figaro, and he was to compose both Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte in these years. This was also the time in which he composed the last three symphonies and the great “Coronation” Concerto. On the negative side, this period saw the death of Mozart's father, who even at this point had been a guiding force in his career. And financially, even though Mozart had realized some impressive profits from his operas,he seems not to have managed his money well. His patron, Joseph II, still lived, although his support seems to have been limited to the appointment of Mozart as Kammerkompositeur at the poor salary of 800 Florins (with roughly the same buying power as £ 80 English in 1955). As Mozart's himself put it, the salary was “too much for what he did, and too little for what he could do!” Thus, during these years he began that painful descent into constant financial need that plagued him until the end. The series of pitiful letters in which he begged money of his Masonic lodge brother, Michael Pnchberg, also began at this time. They give testament to the truly deplorable predicament into which Mozart and his family had fallen. As Kammerkompositeur (lit. “Chamber Composer”) Mozart's chief duty seems to have been to supply dance music for the Imperial balls. Thus, in addition to German Dances, we have today a rich array of minuets, ländler, country dances, and other dance music from this time. The “tedesca” or “Teutsche”, as Mozart called it, is defined by character and tempo, for in terms of form it is not much different from a minuet, a waltz, or a ländler. It has two basic meters, duple and triple time, although the type composed by Mozart (as well as Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert) was mostly in triple time. Generally speaking, the “Teutsche” is the fastest of the triple time dance forms, and it is highly active in character - sometimes with strong emphasis on the first and third beats. Its texture and instrumentation vary from dance to dance, and even from section to section - especially in the wind writing. And as in all of Mozart's orchestral dances, no violas are used. Dances in Vienna seem to have been executed somewhat faster than in other places. To guide our tempo choices, we have extant musical clocks and music boxes, as well as other corroborating evidence. For example, concerning the minuet, Mozart himself writes to his sister from Italy (March 1770), pointing out how much slower the dance was played there - presumably as opposed to its tempo in Vienna: “Simply to show you how slowly people dance, I shall presently send you a minuet, which M. Pick danced at the theatre and which everybody danced afterwards at the feste di ballo in Milan. The minuet is, in itself, very fine. Of course it comes from Vienna [...]. It has many notes. Why? Because it is a theatrical minuet and moves slowly.” If the minuet in Vienna - that is, the popular form - was a lively affair, then the Teutsche must have been even that much livelier. It was probably the favored dance of younger couples, who could move around a bit faster than their elders. We have few detailed instructions for correlating steps with the actual music of dances in this period, but Simon Guillaumeis L'almanach dansant (1771) devotes several pages to the steps themselves. Guillaume describes the triple-time version of the German dance as a boiteuse (lit. “lame” or “limping” step), which would correspond with the occasional emphasis on Iirst and third beats. The Teutsche was a dance for couples, and it seems to have combined the gracefully entwined arm movements of the ländler with the quick spirit of the waltz. Of course, by the end of Schubert's career the waltz, with its “scandalous” body contact, was to incorporate and supersede the minuet, the ländler, and the Teutsche as well. Like many other musical sets of the period (string quartets, for example), German dances often came in sixes - usually with a coda to round off each set. The practice of grouping with a common coda reveals Mozart's cyclical concept of these works. Occasionally he combined two sets with a single coda, clearly for dancing purposes. Thus, for example, the dances K. 536 and K. 567 were combined into a single set of twelve. In such cases, the original order of each of the smaller sets was rearranged lo fit into a larger harmonic plan. Other groups of twelve, such as K. 586, were composed from the beginning as unified cycles. Only the German Dances K. 509 and K. 571 have remained in independent groups of six. Some German dances, such as K. 509, had trios, called “Alternativi”, that were meant to be played again after the da capo repeats of the main dances. Otherwise the Teutsche trio was treated like any minuet or waltz, where the trio was played once between the main section and its da capo. But regardless of such conventional external repeats, the internal repeats in German dances (and in all related forms) varied, depending on the situation. The nineteenth century seems to have struck an anti-historical blow by deliberately and consistently ignoring the internal repeats in da capo sections. In a diary entrance of December 1779, Mozart himself reported having heard the da capo sections of certain dance forms repeated several times. On another occasion Leopold Mozart objected to the lack of repeats in a minuet and trio he heard in Salzburg. Considering that Mozart was an inspired master of almost every form that he took up, it may be difficult to agree with the intimation of his wife that he would rather dance than write music. But it is certainly true that he left the dancing world a great legacy. The German dances recorded here are among the finest written in the heyday of that genre. The Teutsche itself may never return to the ballroom, but these brilliant musical memories of it still live on. David Montgomery