Mozart Disliked the Flute, Says Who?

The claim that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart disliked the flute has long circulated in musicological literature, originating primarily from a letter Mozart wrote to his father on 14 February 1778 in Mannheim, in which he stated that he became “quite powerless whenever I am obliged to write for an instrument which I cannot bear.” Although Ward (1954) was the first scholar to seriously question this claim, and Bowers (1992) extended that challenge further, the assumption has continued to appear in musical literature to the present day. This article examines whether the claim holds sufficient weight when the letter is returned to its proper context and placed alongside evidence from the entirety of Mozart's works for flute.

The letter was written under several simultaneous pressures: his failure to deliver the commissioned works of Ferdinand Dejean in full, anxiety over his reputation as a composer, and financial instability ahead of his departure for Paris. Ward (1954) observed that Mozart's reaction reflected the pressures of a specific situation rather than a lasting attitude toward the instrument. Bowers (1992) further argued that the flute of the period was a one-keyed flute (traverso) with inherent intonation limitations, and that Mozart's dissatisfaction was more likely directed at the amateur nature of the patron for whom he was writing than at the instrument itself.

 

An examination of Mozart's works for flute from 1777 to 1791, spanning flute concertos and flute quartets, reveals a deep understanding of the instrument's particular qualities, including the use of the flute as a solitary melodic voice against the orchestra, and a deliberate choice of keys suited to the limitations of the one-keyed flute. Most notably, works composed in the same year as the letter, and those written in Vienna nearly a decade later without any commission, stand in significant tension with the inherited claim. This article proposes that a misreading sustained by the decontextualization of a single letter has had lasting consequences both in scholarship and in the interpretive frameworks performers bring to these works, and that a more thorough weighing of the evidence carries implications not only for music history but for the way performers approach and interpret Mozart's flute repertoire.