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Mozart's Thirty-Eighth Symphony, one of several Prague compositions, dates from late in 1786. At that time, The Marriage of Figaro was being staged to packed houses in Prague, and Mozart had eagerly accepted an invitation to visit the city. In honor of the occasion, he wrote a new symphony, completing it on December 6th of that year. It premiered in Prague on January 19th, 1787, with Mozart himself conducting. The performance was a total success, perhaps in part because one of the last movement's themes had been borrowed from Figaro, which the residents of Prague had taken so much to their hearts. Applause was so sustained that Mozart finally seated himself at the piano and improvised for half an hour, to the great delight of the audience. As one observer later wrote, "We did not, in fact, know which to admire more: his extraordinary powers of composition or his extraordinary playing; together they made such an overwhelming impression on us that we felt we had been sweetly bewitched!"
At this point in his career, Mozart was evolving a new style of composition. He was beginning to write pieces that were more difficult, both in conception and in execution. His musical vision was becoming more progressive, decades beyond that of his contemporaries, and he made increased demands upon performers. Both developments stemmed from his years in Vienna, where audiences and musicians alike were generally more sophisticated than those in other cities. Yet in this work, the composer seems at first to have reverted to an earlier approach, for the Prague Symphony has only three movements, not four. In the 1770s, symphonies were generally written in only three movements. The addition of minuets to the overall structure was a later development. Indeed, many of the symphonies that Mozart composed in his late teens have only three movements, and the Prague Symphony was the last of his symphonies to take this format. However, the work is not a entirely throwback. The balancing of a tense introduction with the more buoyant melodies that follow was a technique that would not take center stage for several more years. Moreover, the part writing, particularly for the winds, is extremely difficult and requires a level of expertise from the players that Mozart did not demand in his earlier works. The overall impression is that, in this symphony from his last decade, he wished to show how he might have approached those earlier efforts had he then possessed the skills that he had by now developed.