Contredanse in C major, “La Bataille” (K. 535)
沃尔夫冈·阿马德乌斯·莫扎特
Mozart’s Contredanse in C major, “La Bataille” (K. 535) is a compact, vividly programmatic dance written in Vienna and entered in his thematic catalogue on 23 January 1788. Though designed for social use rather than the concert hall, it captures late-1780s Viennese political excitement with unusually pointed musical “stage effects” inside an otherwise functional contredanse.
Background and Context
In the 1780s Vienna lived by dancing. Public balls, court festivities, and the busy season of the Redouten (masked balls) demanded a constant supply of fresh contredanses, minuets, and German dances—music intended to be immediately graspable, strongly articulated, and easy to move to. Mozart, after settling in Vienna, became a remarkably fluent supplier of such occasional pieces; his appointment as Kammermusicus (Imperial and Royal Chamber Composer) in December 1787 formalized this practical side of his craft, even as he continued to write works of far larger ambition.
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“La Bataille” belongs to Mozart’s late-Viennese dance production and is dated by his own catalogue entry to 23 January 1788—only months before the trio of great symphonies (K. 543, K. 550, K. 551) and amid acute financial and professional pressures. Precisely because it is “small,” K. 535 offers a telling snapshot of how Mozart responded to the city’s immediate moods and headlines: it is dance music that also gestures toward topical Zeitstück (a piece for the moment) and public spectacle.[1]
Composition and Premiere
Mozart entered K. 535 in his personal thematic catalogue (Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke) under the title “La Bataille” with the date 23 January 1788.[1] Contemporary advertising suggests the piece circulated quickly in copy: the Viennese copyist Laurenz Lausch advertised it in the Wiener Zeitung on 19 March 1788 under the alternate title Die Belagerung Belgrads (“The Siege of Belgrade”), tying the contredanse to current enthusiasm surrounding Austria’s 1788 campaign against the Ottoman Empire.[1]
The exact first performance is not securely documented in modern reference summaries. That is not unusual for dance music of this kind: such pieces were often written for specific ball seasons or venues, performed repeatedly, and transmitted in practical parts rather than in the sort of “premiere event” that later concert culture prefers to document. What can be said with confidence is that K. 535 was conceived for a dance ensemble and quickly reached the market for functional performance material.[2]
Instrumentation
What makes “La Bataille” especially intriguing is that its surviving description points to a deliberately colorful, even theatrical scoring—closer to a miniature “battle piece” than to a polite ballroom number.
Modern reference listings associated with the work describe an orchestra with piccolo, clarinets, bassoon, trumpet, drum, and strings (with the notable omission of violas).[3] That palette—high winds, bright brass, and percussion—suggests sound effects meant to cut through a lively room: the piccolo’s edge, the trumpet’s martial profile, and the drum’s unmistakable military association.
At the same time, catalogue summaries can present simplified “standard” scorings for dances, and some listings emphasize a more conventional dance-ensemble layout (e.g., pairs of oboes and horns with strings and bass).[4] The broader point remains: K. 535’s identity is bound up with instrumental color—and with the idea of a contredanse that paints a scene, not merely a beat.
Form and Musical Character
As a contredanse, “La Bataille” is built for regular phrases and clear repetitions—features that coordinate groups of dancers and allow figures to “lock” to predictable cadences. Yet Mozart’s title invites listeners to hear those phrases as more than symmetrical dance units. “Battle” music in the late eighteenth century often relied on recognizable sonic emblems: trumpet calls, drumming patterns, abrupt dynamic contrasts, and bright “outdoor” sonorities.
Rather than attempting a narrative in the symphonic sense, K. 535 seems to aim for immediate, pictorial legibility. One can imagine the room responding not only to the steps but to the wit of the allusion: a ballroom contredanse momentarily dressed as a military tableau. This is program music at social scale—brief, practical, and designed to communicate its idea in seconds.
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Its interest within Mozart’s output also lies in timing. In early 1788 he was composing for the city’s present tense: alongside K. 535, Mozart entered a patriotic war-related song, Ein deutsches Kriegslied (“Ich möchte wohl der Kaiser sein”), K. 539, on 5 March 1788—again linked by documentation to the same wave of public enthusiasm.[1] Against the familiar narrative of 1788 as the year of Mozart’s “abstract” symphonic summit, these topical miniatures reveal a parallel creative life: music written to circulate quickly, to be played often, and to meet Vienna where it lived.
Reception and Legacy
“La Bataille” has never occupied the central place in Mozart reception reserved for the operas, concertos, or final symphonies—partly because dances were long treated as ephemera, and partly because their original function (accompanying coordinated movement in a specific social setting) is difficult to recreate authentically in modern listening habits.
Yet K. 535 deserves attention precisely as late Mozart working at close range. It shows how he could compress characterization into a handful of bars and how he could translate public events into musical signs without sacrificing clarity of phrase. In this sense, “La Bataille” stands alongside other programmatically titled contredanses from the same milieu: evidence that Mozart’s Viennese dance music was not merely generic filler, but a field where topical reference, instrumental experiment, and sharp theatrical instinct could all appear—briefly, and with disarming directness.[5]
[1] MozartDocuments.org: contextual note citing Mozart’s thematic-catalogue date for K. 535 (23 Jan 1788) and the *Wiener Zeitung* advertisement (19 Mar 1788) under the title *Die Belagerung Belgrads*.
[2] Köchel-Verzeichnis (Mozarteum): work page for K. 535 ("La Bataille"), describing it as for dance ensemble and listing its catalogue affiliations/publications.
[3] IMSLP: K. 535 page giving general information and an instrumentation summary (incl. piccolo, clarinets, trumpet, drum, strings).
[4] Köchel-Verzeichnis (Mozarteum, German): K. 535 page including a brief scoring line (oboes, horns, strings, bass).
[5] Wikipedia: list entry noting K. 535 among Mozart’s programmatic contredanses (context for genre and topical titles).