Tempo Choices in Mozart’s Minuets: Considerations from a Conductor’s Point of View

This article focuses on the two main types of minuets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—Tempo di Menuetto and Menuetto Allegretto—that appear in his symphonic works and in his pieces for dance accompaniment. Drawing on primary sources by Johann Joachim Quantz, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Heinrich Christoph Koch, and Johann Gottlob Türk, I compare the tempo choices by selected conductors (Böhm 1962, Karajan 1971, Norrington 1991, Hogwood 1997, Harnoncourt 2014) in the third movement of Mozart’s Symphony no. 41 (K. 551, 1788). These five recordings represent a broad spectrum of tempi for Mozart’s Menuetto Allegretto movement in this symphony. After his time at Mannheim (1777-1778), Mozart moved away from the slower courtly dance to a faster type of minuet in his symphonic works. In their respective treatises and encyclopedias, contemporaries Quantz, Kirnberger, Koch, and Türk discuss the performance practice of eighteenth-century minuets played for dances and those for purely instrumental contexts. Rhythmic values defined the tempo of the minuet; the shorter the notes, the slower it was to be performed and vice versa. For conductors and musicians today, this distinction between Mozart’s Tempo di Menuetto and Menuetto Allegretto is important in determining a tempo that is informed by historical performance practice of the Classical period.