In his own hand

At the top of this page, in his own hand, Mozart wrote: « Sinfonia di Wolfgango Amadeo Mozart mpr. d. 26 April 79. »¹ The mpr is short for manu propria — "by his own hand." It is a signature, a date, and a small act of ownership, and it is the reason a manuscript is worth more than any printed edition: this is the paper the music first touched.

Salzburg, 1779

Mozart was twenty-three, not the twenty-four the exhibition labels sometimes claim.² He had just come home from a long, disappointing trip to Mannheim and Paris and was back in the service of the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, Hieronymus Colloredo — a household he experienced as servitude and would break from, for good, two years later.³ Symphony No. 32 belongs to that cramped last Salzburg stretch.

An overture pretending to be a symphony

K.318 is cast as an Italian opera overture: three sections that run into one another without a pause — Allegro spiritoso, Andante, and a return to the opening — so the whole thing arrives as a single bright arc.⁴ He scored it for four horns, twice the usual pair, and the extra weight tells.⁵ He liked it enough to reuse it: in 1785, in Vienna, it became the overture to someone else's opera.⁶

The paper itself

The autograph is held by the New York Public Library's Music Division. It came down through Mozart's widow, Constanze, and the publisher Johann André, and it carries his signature, his dated inscription, and the opening bars in his own ink.⁷ We changed nothing and set nothing in type. What is on the shirt is a fragment of the page, recoloured to a single ink — the hand, not a facsimile of it.