Generally speaking, nine year-olds do not write symphonies. Unless, that is, the nine year-old in question happens to be named Mozart. That he had already written at least two such works a year earlier notwithstanding, the piece is a miniature gem of a symphony even if, in three movements and a total running time of about seven minutes, the definition requires a bit of stretching. Following a bout with what was described at the time as abdominal typhus during a European trip in late 1765, Wolfgang penned the fifth symphony in The Hague in December and it was first performed in Amsterdam the following January. Adhering to models established by Johann Christian Bach and Karl Friedrich Abel, both established, mature composers, the symphony is actually a sort of three part overture and sounds somewhat Italian. The first movement is the simplest of the three, with a pair of contrasting melodies and rudimentary counterpoint. Of note is that Mozart has moved beyond the terraced dynamics found in Baroque music and the movement is dynamically rich considering its tiny scope. The middle movement, a three minute andante, features a plaintive minor key motif and the counterpoint is more than elementary. Once again, young Mozart uses dynamic enhancements in the form of crescendos and accents to push the work toward the future. The finale, brisk and brief at just over one minute, is eerily prescient of later Mozart and heard alone would not betray itself as the work of a nine year-old. Upon hearing this work, we might forgive Leopold Mozart the hyperbole with which he described Wolfgang at that time: "... my boy ... at his age of eight knows all that can be expected of a man of forty ... he who does not hear and see this cannot believe it." Indeed.

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