Notes for: July 14, 2009
In addition to his 22 string quartets, Mozart wrote two quartets for piano, violin, viola and cello. They were pioneer works – the piano was in its infancy, and its literature consisted mainly of concertos and salon pieces. With the minor exception of Johann Schobert, a Silesian composer who had died in Paris in 1767, no one before had placed the piano in a chamber-music setting – that is, with a piano part of concerto difficulty balanced by three equally prominent string instruments. Not even Haydn, who developed the piano trio and the string quartet.
According to Georg Nissen, who married Mozart’s widow and was one of his early biographers, the E flat Major Quartet was the second of three in this unusual instrumentation to be commissioned by the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister in 1785. After publication of the first piano quartet, K. 478, Hoffmeister complained that the public would not buy the work, and Mozart voluntarily released him from the contract. Hoffmeister, in turn, allowed Mozart to retain the advance payment on condition that he not complete the other two quartets.
Mozart kept his promise only halfway – the following year he completed the second quartet, K. 493, and gave it to another publisher. The second quartet did no better commercially than the first, and Mozart dropped the project. In the 19th century, however, the piano quartet became a favorite format of both composers and performers, and Schumann, Brahms and Dvorák all wrote piano quartets based on Mozart’s model.
There were two reasons why Mozart’s piano quartets failed to win favor with the Viennese public. First, of course, was their novelty. Second, they were too difficult for home performance – they made technical demands on all four instrumentalists beyond the ability of the typical amateur musician of the day.
But why did Mozart, always pressed for funds, write so commercially unviable a work and then follow it up with a second piano quartet nine months later? There is no certain answer, but we know that at the time Mozart was making a living as a concert pianist and was preoccupied with composing music for his own performance. It was the period of the great piano concertos – he wrote six in 1784, and three more each in 1785 and 1786. The quartets were among six works during that period in which Mozart carried his interest in the piano into chamber music.
The quartet opens with a dramatic first theme, seasoned with bouncing octaves in the pianist’s left hand and embodying a two-measure fanfare. More important is the second theme. Two strong chords command our attention, and the piano states a motto-like pattern seasoned by an ornamental turn. This motto is to be repeated 37 times in the movement, and a third theme, offered by the violin, is an outgrowth from it. The motto, stated in forte unison, begins the development, which treats the motto as a canon (e.g., a round), with overlapping entrances. The motto again dominates the coda, where it is treated in fugal fashion with eight appearances!
The piano opens the Larghetto slow movement with a gentle theme again marked by an ornamental turn, and the strings alternate with the piano in expanding and elaborating the strain. The contrasting middle section is really a further elaboration of the melody with expressive piano passages. A sense of tenderness is added through the use of echoing phrases – that is, with exact repetitions or with some modification.
The third movement is a rondo, with a repeating refrain interrupted by contrasting episodes. The piano states the refrain in the opening eight measures, and it is taken up by the violin. The first episode is a dialog between the strings and the piano, and the second episode is in the minor mode with challenging triplet passages for the piano. In the concluding coda, the refrain and the first episode are ingeniously combined.