- Composer
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756–1791) - Work
- Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 “Turkish”
- Composed
- Completed December 20, 1775, Salzburg (Mozart aged 19)
- Movements
- Three movements
I. Allegro aperto (A major)
II. Adagio (E major)
III. Rondeau — Tempo di Menuetto (A major) - Scoring
- Solo violin, 2 oboes, 2 horns in D, strings
- Duration
- About 30 minutes (28–32 depending on recording)
- Premiere
- Salzburg court, 1775–76 (presumed)
Exact date and soloist not preserved - Autograph
- Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Kraków, Poland
- Critical edition
- Henle Verlag / Neue Mozart-Ausgabe V/14/1
- Nickname
- “Turkish” (attached by 19th-century commentators; Mozart’s autograph reads only “Concerto”)
In a single year — 1775, when he was nineteen — Mozart wrote five violin concertos back to back. He finished the last one, K. 219, on December 20. Over the sixteen years of life he had left, he never wrote another violin concerto. Not one. The detail that makes this stranger: he was the concertmaster of the Salzburg court at the time. A working violinist by day, who walked away from his own instrument the moment the ink dried.
Musicologists still can’t agree on why. What they do agree on is that buried in the third movement of that final concerto — between the powdered wigs and the minuet curtsies — is a thirty-second flashback to a different sound entirely. The sound of an Ottoman military band that had stood outside the walls of Vienna ninety-two years earlier, and that Salzburg had been trying to forget, and failing to forget, ever since.
Five Concertos in Nine Months, Then Sixteen Years of Silence
The numbers themselves are the strangest part. Mozart finished K. 207 in April 1775, K. 211 in June, K. 216 in September, K. 218 in October, and K. 219 on December 20. Five concertos in nine months. The “K.” numbers come from the 19th-century cataloguer Ludwig von Köchel, who organized Mozart’s works chronologically. Then, for the remaining sixteen years of his life, the count stayed at five. He wrote operas, symphonies, piano concertos, string quintets, a Requiem. He never wrote another violin concerto.
Imagine a star quarterback who plays one Super Bowl season at nineteen, breaks every passing record, and then quietly tells the league he’s never throwing a forward pass again — but he’ll keep showing up to practice. That’s roughly the shape of what Mozart did. He stayed in the music world. He stayed wildly productive. He simply closed one door and locked it.
And he closed it on his own profession. At the time he was concertmaster of the Salzburg court — first chair, principal violinist, the guy whose face people looked at when the strings entered. The instrument paid his rent. Walking away from writing for it is the equivalent of a working novelist quitting the novel while keeping the day job teaching novel-writing.
The reasons remain murky. Four circumstantial threads get pulled together. First, Archbishop Colloredo had taken the Salzburg throne in 1772, and the Mozart family was already chafing under his thrift and rigidity; the concerto blitz of 1775 may have been Mozart proving he was still earning his concertmaster paycheck. Second, in 1776 his colleague Antonio Brunetti returned the slow movement of K. 219 with a complaint — we’ll come back to this. Third, in 1777 Mozart resigned the Salzburg job and set off on the long, doomed Mannheim-and-Paris tour that ended with his mother’s death. Fourth, his curiosity quietly migrated to the viola. In the Sinfonia Concertante K. 364, and in his later string quintets, Mozart played the viola part himself. The violin had stopped being the instrument he wanted to think through.
On October 23, 1777, writing home to his father Leopold from Augsburg, Mozart let one sentence slip: “niemand weiß es, wie brav ich Violin spiele” — “no one knows how well I play the violin.” It’s the line of a man who composed five concertos for his own instrument and still felt that nobody quite saw him as a violinist. It reads, in hindsight, like a goodbye letter he didn’t realize he was writing.
So K. 219 isn’t really “Violin Concerto No. 5.” It’s the last violin concerto. A piece written by a teenager saying goodbye to his own instrument, on a day he had no idea was a goodbye. Once you know that, the same thirty minutes don’t quite sit in your chest the same way.
1683, Outside the Walls of Vienna: A Sound Mozart Never Heard
First, a small piece of vandalism on the famous nickname. The word “Turkish” does not appear anywhere on Mozart’s autograph manuscript. What he actually wrote on the title page, in his own hand, was: “Concerto / di Wolfgango Amadeo Mozart / Salisburgo 20 di decembre 1775.” That’s it. The nickname was hung on the piece decades later by 19th-century music writers looking for marketing hooks. Most program notes still skip past this without flagging it.
So why does the minor-key episode in the middle of the third movement sound, unmistakably, “Turkish”? The answer is not in Salzburg in 1775. The answer is at the gates of Vienna in September 1683.
In July 1683 an Ottoman army arrived at the walls of Habsburg Vienna and laid siege. For two months the city starved behind its fortifications. The siege broke on September 12, when a Polish king named Jan III Sobieski led the largest cavalry charge in European history down from the Kahlenberg hills and shattered the Ottoman line. This is the Siege of Vienna you’ll find in any Western Civilization survey. What the textbooks tend to leave out is what the city of Vienna heard for those two months.
The Ottoman army had brought its band with it. The Mehter — the military music corps of the Sultan, also called the Janissary band by Western Europeans — marched with massive bass drums, crash cymbals, triangles, and a tall procession of ceremonial banners. Heavy downbeats. Repeating minor-key melodic cells with chromatic inflections. A relentless, marching pulse that didn’t release. The Viennese heard this sound, hour after hour, drifting over the city walls. The army eventually withdrew. The sound did not. It took root.
By the 18th century, what had once been the soundtrack of an existential threat had been domesticated into a fashion. Composers called it the alla turca style. Bass drum, cymbals, triangle — the so-called “Janissary” percussion section — got slipped into operas, symphonies, keyboard works. Gluck used it on stage. Haydn used it in the “Military” Symphony. Mozart himself would use it most famously in the final movement of his Piano Sonata K. 331, the piece we now just call the “Turkish March.” What had been terror at the gates was now a costume at the costume ball. A century did that.
December 1775. A nineteen-year-old sits down at a desk in a Salzburg apartment and writes his fifth violin concerto. In the middle of the third movement, the bright A-major minuet suddenly snaps to A minor (the same melodic world tilted sideways into shadow). The cellos and basses have a marking written into their parts: col legno battuto — strike the strings with the wooden stick of the bow, not the hair. The point of the marking is to imitate the bass drum of the Mehter. Mozart isn’t writing a tune from Turkey. He’s writing a memory of a sound the city of Vienna couldn’t shake.
Put differently: the noise the besiegers made outside the walls of Vienna in 1683 stayed inside Viennese musical memory for ninety-two years, and then surfaced for about ninety seconds in the middle of a Salzburg court concerto. Mozart never wrote the word “Turkish” on his manuscript. But the sound he’s quoting starts seventy-three years before he was born, on the wrong side of the Vienna city walls.
Some musicologists push one step further. They argue Mozart was specifically quoting himself — that the minor-key episode in K. 219 lifts material from a ballet score he’d written in Milan three years earlier, K. 135a “Le gelosie del serraglio” (“The Jealousies of the Harem”). Only fragments of that ballet survive, so a direct head-to-head comparison isn’t really possible. The hypothesis is plausible: it would mean a teenager remembering an even younger teenager’s piece, and recycling the exotic costume. Worth holding in your back pocket without treating it as settled.
A Different Face Every Movement
First Movement, Allegro aperto: A Concerto That Crashes Its Own Opening
One word in the tempo marking needs unpacking. Aperto. The dictionary says “open” or “clear.” As a musical direction, though, it’s a word Mozart used and almost nobody else did. He marks it on five concerto first movements — K. 175, K. 218, K. 219, K. 246, K. 271 — and by the 19th century the word has essentially vanished from the working vocabulary of composers. Beethoven doesn’t use it. Brahms doesn’t use it. It’s a Mozart fingerprint, the way certain writers have words nobody else picks up.
So “Allegro aperto” is less a tempo than a flavor. Something like: fast, yes, but open, singing, unhurried in tone even at speed. And the clearest demonstration of what Mozart means by that word arrives about a minute into the piece.
The orchestra opens with a fully formed A-major first theme. This is concerto convention 101 — the orchestra states the blueprint, the soloist will enter and take that same material for a spin. Everyone in 1775 knew the script. The soloist’s job at this moment is to come in at the same Allegro tempo, with the same theme, like a guest stepping into a conversation that’s already going. That is not what Mozart does. Six bars before the soloist’s entry, the entire ensemble slams the brakes. The marking switches to Adagio. The violin enters not in tempo but in a slow, declamatory aria, six bars of singing time stolen out of the middle of a fast movement. Then — only then — the original Allegro resumes, and the piece proceeds as if nothing happened.
Translate that into a non-musical scene. It’s as if a stand-up set had been going at full pace, and five minutes in, the comic suddenly stopped, walked to the front of the stage, told a quiet ninety-second story about their grandmother, and then walked back and resumed the routine without comment. Across the entire 18th-century concerto repertoire, an opening this brazen is a genuine outlier. Even concertgoers who don’t read scores tend to lean forward when those six bars hit — something has just bent that wasn’t supposed to bend.
📜 악보 지점: K.219 1st movement mm. 39-44 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Mozart violin concerto 5 Hilary Hahn Grumiaux
This is what aperto means in practice. Open — meaning the form itself is left a little open, a side door propped ajar. The confidence required to write that side door at nineteen, on a piece that was supposed to be a workmanlike demonstration of competence for one’s Salzburg employer, tells you most of what you need to know about who Mozart already was.
Second Movement, Adagio: The Movement That Got Returned to Sender
The slow movement sits in E major. The melody is almost embarrassingly simple — a tune you could hum after one hearing, the kind of line that sounds like it had always existed and Mozart just transcribed it. Underneath that singable line, though, the orchestra is doing patient, intricate counterpoint (independent inner voices weaving against the tune, so the texture is busier than the surface suggests). Simple top, sophisticated underneath. This combination — disarming melody, hidden craft — is one of the things Mozart does better than almost anyone in music history.
Shortly after the concerto was finished, in 1776, the Salzburg concertmaster Antonio Brunetti returned the Adagio. His complaint, in two German words: zu studiert. Too studied. Too contrived. Too academic. He felt the inner workings were too visible — that it didn’t breathe like an Adagio should. He wasn’t going to play it as it stood.
Mozart’s response was not to argue. He just wrote a replacement movement, on the side, and handed it over. That replacement is now known as K. 261, Adagio in E major — a piece that exists as a standalone work in the Mozart catalogue specifically because his colleague turned down the original. Most musicologists today read K. 261 as the K. 219 substitute; a minority of NMA editors have argued it belongs to K. 207 instead, but a 1776 letter from Leopold Mozart leans more naturally toward the K. 219 reading.
In modern office terms, Mozart had a draft kicked back by a coworker, wrote a second draft, and let both survive. What makes this a strange episode in music history is which one survived as canon. Brunetti rejected the original. The original is what every violinist on earth plays today. K. 261 hangs around as a footnote, an alternate Adagio, the version preserved by the very fact that someone once said no. The composer’s instinct outlasted the colleague’s veto by two hundred and fifty years. There is a useful career lesson buried in that fact for anyone who has ever had a manager send something back with the note “too smart.”
📜 악보 지점: K.219 2nd movement opening (IMSLP 링크 미등록)
Third Movement, Rondeau — Tempo di Menuetto: Tea Party with a Hidden War Drum
The tempo heading announces itself in French, not Italian. Rondeau, with that French “-eau” ending, instead of the Italian Rondò Mozart would normally have written in a Salzburg court context. The choice is deliberate. The French spelling is a tip of the hat toward the galant style — the powdered, mannered, deliberately weightless aesthetic of Versailles salons. Mozart is telling the listener, in the first second: this finale is going to wear silk shoes.
And for the first half, it really does. The main theme is a graceful A-major minuet that returns four times, with short, light episodes between the returns. It’s the musical equivalent of a tea service in a sunlit drawing room: a polite refrain, a witty aside, another polite refrain. Nothing in the first half prepares you for what arrives at roughly the midpoint.
The key snaps to A minor. The mood collapses. The cellos and basses pick up their bows and flip them around — the marking is col legno battuto, “struck with the wood.” Instead of drawing the horsehair across the strings, they’re hitting the strings with the bow’s wooden stick. The sound is dry, percussive, slightly menacing, completely un-string-like. In 1775, this marking on a concerto manuscript was almost unheard of. The effect would later become a horror-film staple — Berlioz uses it in the witches’ Sabbath of the Symphonie fantastique in 1830, Sarasate exploits it in Zigeunerweisen — but Mozart got there fifty-five years early, in what was supposed to be a polite court entertainment.
The downbeats grow heavier. The melodic line drops into chromatic, minor-mode marching figures. The cello-and-bass thumping imitates the great Mehter bass drum. This is the alla turca moment in full — the eighteenth-century Vienna fashion pulled, by a teenager in Salzburg, into the center of his polite finale. The nickname “Turkish” exists because of these ninety seconds.
The way the episode ends is, in some ways, weirder than the way it starts. After all that minor-key drumming, the music simply pretends nothing happened. The minuet returns, sunlit, in A major, as though the entire scene had been an unfortunate noise from outside the window. We were at a polite garden party. Then a marching column went past the gate. Then we were back at the garden party. The host pours another cup of tea. Nobody is supposed to mention the column. That is the architecture of this movement.
📜 악보 지점: K.219 3rd movement mm. 198-227 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Anne-Sophie Mutter Mozart K.219 third movement 1978 EMI
Why You Should Bother, Tonight
K. 219 runs about thirty minutes — the shortest of Mozart’s five violin concertos. It’s also the strangest. Compare it to the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D, the genre’s most famous monument, and the contrast is structural. Beethoven builds a cathedral; you walk in, and the architecture does the work. Mozart, at nineteen, writes something closer to a diary entry. There are moments where the form bends. There are vocabulary words only this composer uses. There’s a ninety-two-year-old soundtrack flickering through one wall, visible for a moment and then gone.
If this is your first time, here’s the order I’d recommend. Skip ahead to the minor-key episode in the third movement first. It’s about ninety seconds. You’ll hear the bass drums, you’ll hear the wooden bow-sticks hitting strings, and the entire story about Vienna in 1683 will land in real time. Then back up and listen to the first movement straight through, with one ear specifically tuned for those six Adagio bars — the moment where the violin enters in slow motion before the piece resumes at speed. Last, listen to the second movement whole. That’s the one Brunetti tried to send back. Listen with the question: what would have offended a working violinist about this?
Three things you can listen for that don’t require any music theory background. One: the soloist enters in the wrong tempo on purpose, sings for six bars, then catches up. Two: the slow movement is the one a colleague tried to refuse. Three: the elegant minuet finale gets interrupted by a brief, slightly violent flashback that none of the characters acknowledge. Hold those three handles, and thirty minutes goes by fast.
Six Recordings — Textbook Answer, Period-Instrument Reset, and a Teenage Debut
Objective comparison is what magazine roundups are for. What follows is biased.
Arthur Grumiaux / Colin Davis / London Symphony (Philips, 1961–64). If you want to know what the Franco-Belgian school of violin playing sounded like at its most distilled, this is the disc. Elegance, restraint, a kind of poise that doesn’t show off. The 1960s house style at peak refinement. Best starting point for a first listen — the architecture is clean, the playing trusts you. The only complaint is that it’s almost too well-mannered. If you came in hoping for a dramatic Mozart, you’ll need to look elsewhere on this list.
Anne-Sophie Mutter / Karajan-era Philharmonia / Muti (EMI, 1978). A fifteen-year-old plays a nineteen-year-old’s music. That sentence is half the album. This was Mutter’s first EMI session, recorded just after Karajan picked her out as a teenage prodigy. The tone is dense, dark, surprisingly mature for a player still in school. Listeners who like a lean, classical Mozart will find this thick. Listeners who hear it once will think about it forever. Mutter rerecorded the concertos in the 1990s, and the 1978 version is still the more intense reading.
Hilary Hahn / Marriner / Stuttgart Radio Symphony (DG, 2005). If Grumiaux is the textbook, Hahn is the textbook answer key. This sits in the middle of every modern checklist: clean intonation, controlled vibrato, transparent ensemble. It’s the recording that gets handed to conservatory students as the reference. The flip side of being the reference is that it can sound a little memorized, a little too sure of every choice. If you don’t want to play it safe, the next four are where you go.
Frank Peter Zimmermann / Harding / Berliner Philharmoniker (Sony, 2015). The novelty of this recording is the cadenza — the brief passage in the middle of the first movement where the orchestra drops out and the soloist plays alone, often improvisationally. Mozart didn’t leave a cadenza for K. 219, so every soloist makes a choice. Zimmermann didn’t borrow one; he composed his own. The reading sits between Berlin Philharmonic body weight and Salzburg galant elegance, and it manages the balance well. The risk of being that balanced is sounding like a polite committee meeting.
Isabelle Faust / Antonini / Il Giardino Armonico (Harmonia Mundi, 2016). The dangerous one. Put this on after any of the modern-instrument readings and everything else suddenly sounds overweight. Gut strings (made the old way, from animal intestine — drier, grainier, more nasal than the steel strings standard since the 20th century), small orchestra, fast tempos. This is what the period-performance camp thinks Mozart should sound like in the 21st century, and it’s the most persuasive argument I’ve heard for that case. The side effect is permanent: once you’ve spent thirty minutes inside this sound, your ears recalibrate.
Itzhak Perlman / Levine / Vienna Philharmonic (DG, 1983). Faust’s polar opposite, recorded in the same century. This is the maximalist case for warm, golden, fully-vibrated, romantic-era Mozart. The same six Adagio bars from the first movement, which feel like cold dawn air on the Faust recording, sound on Perlman like a velvet curtain pulled across a sunlit room. If you hear Perlman and think “too much,” you should immediately put on Faust and let the temperature drop. Two recordings, thirty-three years apart, mapping the two extreme edges of what this piece can be.
A one-line summary: first time, Grumiaux. For an unforgettable first impression, Mutter 1978. For 21st-century Mozart, Faust.
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Mozart violin concerto 5 Hilary Hahn Grumiaux
Recommended Video Performances
The three landmarks discussed in the body of this article are easier to recognize on video than on audio alone. The four clips below were chosen for exactly that.
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Mozart violin concerto 5 Hilary Hahn Grumiaux
Hilary Hahn with Marriner and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony — a complete performance in the modern reference style. The cleanest place to first identify those six aperto Adagio bars in the opening movement.
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Anne-Sophie Mutter Mozart K.219 1978 EMI complete
Anne-Sophie Mutter’s 1978 EMI debut. The recording is a historical document on its own terms — fifteen-year-old fingers playing nineteen-year-old music. Worth one listen for the sheer collision of biographies.
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Isabelle Faust Antonini Il Giardino Armonico Mozart K.219
Isabelle Faust with Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini. Gut strings and period instruments. The col legno effect in the third movement comes through more clearly here than on any modern-orchestra recording — drier, more woodwork-on-string than the heavier sound of steel-stringed cellos.
🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Mozart K.219 col legno turkish episode third movement close-up
A close-up clip isolating the “Turkish” episode in the third movement. The camera catches the cellists physically rotating their bows and tapping the strings with the wooden side. Watch the moment of rotation — that’s 1683 walking briefly into the frame.
Following Along with the Score
The three landmarks in this article all map cleanly onto specific bars in the score. First movement, measures 39–44 — the aperto fake start. You can literally see the tempo marking change as the soloist enters six bars early in the wrong gear. Second movement opening — the texture Brunetti rejected as “too studied,” with the inner orchestral voices visibly weaving counterpoint underneath a single-line tune. Looking at the page makes the complaint legible: there is a lot happening underneath the melody, and a working violinist who wanted a flowing Adagio might reasonably have asked for less. Third movement, around measures 198–227 — the moment the key signature flips toward A minor and the col legno battuto marking appears in the cello and bass parts, all on a single double-page spread.
The autograph manuscript itself is held in Kraków, at the Biblioteka Jagiellońska. It used to live in Berlin. During the final months of the Second World War, the Prussian State Library evacuated a large portion of its musical holdings eastward to keep them safe from Allied bombing. After the war, those crates were assumed lost — destroyed, looted, or sunk somewhere in the chaos. In the 1970s a substantial cache, including the K. 219 autograph, was quietly revealed to be in the Jagiellonian University’s library in Kraków, where it remains. The title page still carries Mozart’s handwriting and the date “20 di decembre 1775, Salisburgo.”
That the page does not contain the word “Turkish,” and that a nineteen-year-old wrote that date on his last violin concerto without knowing it would be his last — those two facts are the corners of the picture. Everything you hear inside K. 219 sits somewhere between them.