“Beim Auszug in das Feld” (K. 552) — Mozart’s Patriotic Lied in A major
ヴォルフガング・アマデウス・モーツァルト作
Mozart’s Beim Auszug in das Feld (K. 552) is an A‑major Lied for solo voice and keyboard, entered in his catalogue on 11 August 1788 in Vienna. Written amid the opening enthusiasm for Joseph II’s war against the Ottoman Empire, it shows Mozart applying his theatrical instincts and gift for clear declamation to an unusually expansive strophic song.
Background and Context
In the summer of 1788—one of Mozart’s most astonishingly productive Vienna periods—he noted the completion of Beim Auszug in das Feld on 11 August 1788, immediately after recording the “Jupiter” Symphony (K. 551) the day before [1] [2]. The song belongs to a small cluster of works reacting to current events: patriotic or martial pieces associated with Emperor Joseph II’s campaign against the Ottoman Empire (1788–1791) [2]. Although Mozart is not primarily remembered as a composer of political occasional music, he could respond quickly and effectively to public themes—especially when they offered vivid, stage-ready situations.
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The work’s modest place in the repertory may be explained by practical factors. It is long in text (and thus in performance), tied to a specific historical moment, and its original dissemination was atypical: it was printed in a short-lived Viennese periodical rather than launched as a salon “hit” [2]. Yet precisely here lies its interest: it lets listeners hear Mozart balancing public rhetoric with the intimate scale of the Lied.
Text and Composition
The Köchel-Verzeichnis lists the piece as a song for voice and clavier (V, clav), in A major, with an unknown author of the text; it survives as a complete, authentic work [1]. The poem comprises 18 stanzas. Mozart sets the music so that each musical strophe accommodates two stanzas, requiring nine repetitions to deliver the whole text [2].
The opening stanza frames the narrative in overtly public terms—loyalty to the “high emperor’s word”—but the text soon broadens into moral and theological argument: Joseph is praised not only as commander, but as a humane ruler whose justice embraces “Jew and Christian,” even “Turk,” under a single God [2]. This mixture of militarized imagery and Enlightenment-inflected moralizing is characteristic of the late-1780s Habsburg public sphere, and it helps explain why Mozart could treat the song as more than a simple marching tune.
Musical Character
As a Lied, Beim Auszug in das Feld is built for clarity and memorability: a strophic design that can bear repeated delivery while keeping the vocal line direct and rhetorically emphatic. The keyboard part functions less as bravura accompaniment than as a disciplined partner in projection—supporting declamation, delineating phrase structure, and helping each stanza land with a sense of cadence and closure.
What makes the piece distinctive within Mozart’s song output is its scale of utterance: it is not the inward lyricism of Das Veilchen (K. 476) or the concentrated late-style simplicity of the 1791 songs, but a “public” Lied that still relies on chamber forces. The contrast is telling. In 1788 Mozart could write the most learned symphonic counterpoint for the concert hall and, almost alongside it, craft a domestic, singable vehicle for civic sentiment. Heard today—selecting representative stanzas, as performers often do—the song rewards attention as a document of Mozart’s Vienna: topical, pragmatic, and musically purposeful, showing how his vocal writing could serve not only drama and devotion, but also the rhetoric of public life.
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[1] Köchel-Verzeichnis (International Mozarteum Foundation): work entry with dating (Vienna, 11 Aug 1788), key, authenticity, and instrumentation (V, clav).
[2] Wikipedia: overview article with historical context (Joseph II’s war), publication note, and stanza structure (18 stanzas; music repeated to cover text).