“Haffner” Symphony
With his concerts, teaching, clavier playing, and miscellaneous composing Mozart may well have felt, as he remarked on one occasion, that “people sometimes expected impossibilities of me.” The Haffner family in Salzburg, for instance, asked Leopold to write a symphony for some family festivity, to be ready in something like a fortnight! Wolfgang, at that time up to his ears in a quantity of other schemes, found the labor shifted to his own shoulders by his father, who was otherwise busied. Somehow or other he contrived to turn out (in a trifle over the appointed time, it is true) the work we now know as the “Haffner” Symphony. The excellent Salzburg burgomaster, Sigmund Haffner appears to have been well pleased. The composer himself instantly forgot the work and was astonished and delighted when, a considerable time afterwards, his father sent him the score. He worked at several operatic projects but nothing lasting came of them—not even of The Goose of Cairo, which contains charming passages and which, now and then, people have attempted to revive. There was, indeed, an amateur performance in Vienna of Idomeneo. But these and several other schemes must all be dismissed as transient compared with the masterpiece we now approach—Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro).