Symphony No.1 in E-flat major (K.16) (Full Score)

Mozart Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major (K.16) (Full Score)

Mozart’s first symphony to survive in complete form, the Symphony in E-flat major (K.16) has come down to us in an autograph score headed “Sinfonia di Sig: Wolfgang Mozart a london.”  It takes its date, 1764, from a non-autograph inscription on the manuscript.  This date can be made more precise if we are willing to identify the symphony with a remark occurring in a letter of 24 November 1799 from Mozart’s sister, now Imperial Baroness von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg, to the music publishers Breitkopf & Härtel.  Here she claims that her brother composed his first symphony in London while their father was suffering from a severe illness, and thus in August or September 1764.  This comment can, with some reservations, be related to K.16. 

Leopold’s illness evidently put an end to most of the family’s social activities and concertising, giving the boy-genius an opportunity to satisfy his creative urge in the form of compositions he worked out and wrote down himself.  The first orchestral score by the eight year old composer reveals not only corrections in his own hand but alterations by his teacher father.  It is the resultant definitive, revised version that is reproduced in our edition.  However, readers are also referred to a highly illuminating facsimile of the autograph score, located today in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Kraków.  Here we can descry, amidst the many alterations, the first compositional layer prior to Leopold’s interventions.

- Urtext of the New Mozart Edition

- Full score and performance material (BA9165) available for sale

.