1.vi.25—Haarlem
I recently learned about the only two performances of Mozart’s music in the United States during his lifetime: a solo piano sonata performed by Alexander Reinagle at the City-Tavern in Philadelphia in 1786, and a duet for pianoforte and violin (likely with Reinagle at the keyboard again) in New York in 1789. Both events are discussed in the excellent online resource Mozart: New Documents by Dexter Edge and David Black (Philadelphia performance and New York performance).
City Tavern (left) and Bank of Pennsylvania, Birch’s Views of Philadelphia, 1800 (Wikimedia Commons)
It’s fun to speculate about what kind of piano might have been used for these concerts. Interestingly, another recent discovery (the articles on these two concerts were published in 2018) offers at least one possible candidate for the Philadelphia performance. In 2020, Thomas Strange of the Sigal Music Museum* was given a piano that he eventually identified as the work of Johan Berent—previously known only through 1775 advertisements in Philadelphia newspapers. Berent, a native of the Netherlands (or possibly Saxony), studied in London and spent time in Portugal before settling in the U.S. and founding a piano-making workshop.
The surviving instrument is essentially English in design, resembling the pianos of his teacher Americus Backers (whose wife, amusingly, was named Philadelphia). It would have been a fine vehicle for Mozart’s music. We don’t know exactly which works were performed, but as Edge and Black suggest, the solo sonata could have been any of the pieces available on the Continent by that time, up to and including the Fantasia and Sonata in C minor, K. 475 and K. 457—though these later works are arguably less likely.
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One more curiosity: not far from the New York venue where the duet was performed, Mozart’s famed librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte was buried several decades later. The cemetery has since been paved over, and the remains were moved to Calvary Cemetery. Da Ponte’s American period is full of surprises—he ran a grocery store, founded an opera company, and taught Italian at Columbia, all of it preceded by an unsuccessful stint in London, which he left in a hurry to evade debt. Imagining Mozart walking the streets of New York isn’t entirely far-fetched—if only his life hadn’t been cut so tragically short…
*For more about the Berent piano, see Berent Piano, 1775: First piano commercially made and sold in America