page_title: Mozart family grand tour
section_title: London (April 1764 – July 1765)
hierarchical_section_title: Mozart family grand tour / Grand tour / London (April 1764 – July 1765)
caption_attribution_description: English: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART 1756-1791 composed his first symphony here in 1764
context_page_description: The Mozart family grand tour was a journey through western Europe, undertaken by Leopold Mozart, his wife Anna Maria, and their musically gifted children Maria Anna and Wolfgang Amadeus from 1763 to 1766. At the start of the tour the children were aged eleven and seven respectively. Their extraordinary skills had been demonstrated during a visit to Vienna in 1762, when they had played before the Empress Maria Theresa at the Imperial Court. Sensing the social and pecuniary opportunities that might accrue from a prolonged trip embracing the capitals and main cultural centres of Europe, Leopold obtained an extended leave of absence from his post as deputy Kapellmeister to the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg. Throughout the subsequent tour, the children's Wunderkind status was confirmed as their precocious performances consistently amazed and gratified their audiences.
  The first stage of the tour's itinerary took the family, via Munich and Frankfurt, to Brussels and then on to Paris where they stayed for five months.
context_section_description: The Mozarts' first London lodgings were above a barber's shop in Cecil Court, near St Martin-in-the-Fields. Letters of introduction from Paris proved effective; on 27 April 1764, four days after their arrival, the children were playing before King George III and his 19-year-old German queen, Charlotte Sophia. A second royal engagement was fixed for 19 May, at which Wolfgang was asked by the king to play pieces by Handel, Johann Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel. He was allowed to accompany the queen as she sang an aria, and he later improvised on the bass part of a Handel aria from which, according to Leopold, he produced "the most beautiful melody in such a manner that everyone was astonished".
  Many of the nobility and gentry were leaving town for the summer, but Leopold reckoned that most would return for the king's birthday celebrations on 4 June, and accordingly organised a concert for the 5th. This was deemed a success, and Leopold hastened to arrange for Wolfgang to appear at a benefit concert for a maternity hospital on 29 June, at Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens. Leopold apparently saw this effort to support charitable works as "a way to earn the love of this very special nation". Wolfgang was advertised as "the celebrated and astonishing Master Mozart, a Child of Seven Years of Age..." (he was in fact eight), "justly esteemed the most extraordinary Prodigy, and most amazing Genius, that has appeared in any Age". On 8 July there was a private performance at the Grosvenor Square home of the Earl of Thanet, from which Leopold returned with an inflammation of the throat and other worrying symptoms. "Prepare your heart to hear one of the saddest events", he wrote to Hagenauer in anticipation of his own imminent demise. He was ill for several weeks, and for the sake of his health the family moved from their Cecil Court lodgings to a house in the countryside, at 180 Ebury Street, then considered part of the village of Chelsea.
  During Leopold's illness performances were impossible, so Wolfgang turned to composition. According to the writer and musician Jane Glover, Wolfgang was inspired to write symphonies after meeting Johann Christian Bach. It is not clear when this meeting occurred, or when Wolfgang first heard J. C. Bach's symphonies, although he had played the older composer's harpsichord works in his May 1764 royal recital. Wolfgang soon completed his Symphony No. 1 in E flat, K. 16, and started his No. 4 in D major, K. 19 (which Zaslaw concludes was more likely composed, or at least completed, in The Hague). The D major symphony has, in Hildesheimer's words, "an originality of melody and modulation which goes beyond the routine methods of his [grown-up] contemporaries". These are Wolfgang's first orchestral writings, although Zaslaw hypothesises a theoretical "Symphony No. 0" from sketches in Wolfgang's musical notebook. Three lost symphonies, identified in the Köchel catalogue of Mozart's works only by their incipits (first few bars of music), may also have originated from the London period. Other works composed by Wolfgang in London include several instrumental sonatas, the jewel of which, according to Hildesheimer, is the C major sonata for piano, four hands, K. 19d. A set of violin sonatas, with extra flute and cello parts, was dedicated to Queen Charlotte at her request, and presented to her with an appropriate inscription in January 1765. Wolfgang also wrote his first vocal works, the motet "God is our Refuge", K. 20, and the tenor aria Va, dal furor portata, K. 21.
  At the end of September, with Leopold's recovery, the family moved back to central London, to lodgings in Thrift Street (later 20 Frith Street), Soho. These lodgings were located conveniently close to several concert rooms, and to the residences of both J. C. Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel. Bach, a son of Johann Sebastian Bach, soon became a family friend; Nannerl later recalled Bach and the eight-year-old Wolfgang playing a sonata together, taking turns to play a few bars individually, and that "anyone not watching would have thought it was played
caption: 180 Ebury Street, Pimlico, where the Mozarts stayed in the summer of 1764
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