Music for a Graduation

Track thirteen ended on a guest list, and on the idea that the first night rarely gets in. Track fourteen is a piece written for an occasion, and the occasion is the one thing about it we can’t prove.

First, the facts. Track fourteen runs three minutes and twenty-two seconds. It is the third movement, Menuetto – Trio, of Mozart’s Divertimento in D major, K. 334. The credit is the one from track thirteen: Arr. Garrett / Haywood for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra, with Julien Quentin, Franck van der Heijden, Orchestra the Prezent and John Haywood conducting. Track eleven said Haywood co-arranges the Sibelius and the Mozart. Track thirteen was the Sibelius. This is the Mozart.

Salzburg, summer 1780. Georg Sigmund Robinig has just sat his final law examination at the university. His family is one of the richest in the city, and a friend of the Mozarts. In April he turned twenty.

Somebody wants music for the occasion. The names for that kind of piece are many: cassation, serenade, divertimento. Music made for an occasion.

Music for Robinig.

Mozart was twenty-four. The piece he wrote, if it is the piece, has six movements and runs about forty-two minutes, for two violins, viola, bass and two horns. It is the longest divertimento he ever wrote.

If it is the piece. Mozart’s letters mention a “Robinig music”, and the case that K. 334 is it is strong but not proven. The manuscript has not survived.

Mozart died in 1791. In 1795 a Leipzig publisher, Baumgärtner, printed the divertimento in four movements. The third and the fourth were missing. The third is this minuet.

Four years later, in 1799, a publisher in Augsburg, Gombart, printed all six. Whether the Leipzig edition had anybody’s blessing is uncertain.

So the Menuetto Garrett records reached the public in a complete edition, four years behind a shorter one.

K. 334 has two of them. The fifth movement is a minuet with two trios, one in D minor and one in B minor. The third, ours, is in D major, with a single trio in G major.

Garrett took the third.

Salzburg, 12 September 2026, the Großer Saal of the Mozarteum. The Right to Be Cheeky tells how the evening ended: an encore from Mozart’s E-minor sonata, K. 304, the second movement, marked Tempo di Menuetto, played on the Dalla Costa, Mozart’s own violin.

K. 334 was not in the running order he had with him on stage. Twenty-seven days later comes the record, and K. 334 is on it.

Two Mozarts, then, and one city. Garrett played one on Mozart’s violin, in the hall that carries Mozart’s name. Mozart wrote the other in the same city in 1780.

Say “Mozart” to a violinist and you get the concertos before you have finished the name.

Garrett’s site lists six of them, plus the Sinfonia Concertante and five violin sonatas, K. 304 among them. His first recordings for this label, in the mid-1990s, included the concertos with Claudio Abbado. So for a Mozart track on Immortal, he had plenty of obvious places to return to. He didn’t.

What he took is a minuet from a graduation present.

This series keeps asking one question: what actually carries music past the people who made it?

Track thirteen said immortality keeps its own guest list, and remembers the second night. Track fourteen’s answer is smaller and odder. The music was made for an occasion, with no guarantee that anyone would keep it. The manuscript is gone. The first print dropped it.

So listen to track fourteen as a minuet for a graduation, if that is what it was. Now it has a violin, a guitar, an orchestra, and a place on a record called Immortal.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — arrives 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, with pre-orders open now on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep counting the album in.

Sources & notes: the album credit as Deutsche Grammophon, the DG store, Presto and david-garrett.com print it (checked 3 October 2026); the work, its movements, keys and scoring from the reference works on K. 334; the occasion, Robinig’s examination in July 1780, the lost autograph and the 1795 and 1799 editions from the critical report of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (International Mozarteum Foundation), with Robinig’s birthday from the Henle edition; Garrett’s Mozart repertoire and the 1995 Abbado recording from david-garrett.com; the Salzburg evening and the encore from our own Salzburg coverage. Some catalogues give 1798 for the complete edition; we follow the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe. We don’t say that this minuet is especially well known, because we found no source for it.