PIANO QUARTETS - Abeille Musique

T
HE EMPEROR JOSEPH II’s famous comment on
Mozart’s first Viennese opera Die Entführung aus
dem Serail (‘Too many notes, my dear Mozart, and
too beautiful for our ears’) is probably apocryphal. But
the alleged royal critique does point to a recurrent
problem in Mozart’s music for eighteenth-century
listeners. The richness, intricacy and emotional ambivalence,
especially in the works from the mid-1780s
onwards, that so delight us today were often simply
bewildering to his contemporaries. Reviewing the six
string quartets dedicated to Haydn, the writer in Cramer’s
Magazin der Musik 9 complained that they were ‘too
highly seasoned—and whose palette can endure that for
long?’. The composer Karl von Dittersdorf likewise
criticised the ‘overwhelming and unrelenting artfulness’
of the ‘Haydn’ quartets and accused Mozart of being too
‘prodigal’ with his ideas. But it was not only the quartets
that caused consternation. Don Giovanni, for instance,
was a triumph in Prague (where Mozart rightly claimed he
was ‘understood’ more than anywhere else) but only a
mixed success in Vienna. Joseph II, more reliably
documented this time, pronounced that ‘Mozard’s (sic)
music is certainly too difficult to be sung’. And though he
was later to be proved spectacularly wrong, one German
critic summed up the reactions of many in the late 1780s
when he wrote: ‘The beauty, greatness and nobility of the
music for Don Juan will never appeal anywhere to more
than a handful of the elect. It is not music to everyone’s
taste, merely tickling the ear and letting the heart starve.’
If Don Giovanni was ‘too difficult to be sung’, the G
minor Piano Quartet K478, completed on 16 October
1785, was apparently too difficult to be played. According
to the biography of Mozart by Georg Nissen (second
husband of Constanze Mozart), the work was to be the
first of three piano quartets commissioned by the
composer and publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister. But,
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not surprisingly given its scale and technical and
expressive complexity, the quartet proved unpopular with
the amateur market; and, in Nissen’s words, Hoffmeister
‘made Mozart a present of the advance payment he had
already received, on condition that he should not write the
other two quartets contracted for’.
Mozart, though, evidently relished the challenge of
what was then a novel medium, without significant precedents
(though by a strange coincidence the fourteen-yearold
Beethoven had composed three piano quartets earlier
that same year, 1785). And during the first run of Figaro
in May 1786 he composed a second piano quartet, in E
flat, completed on 3 June and published the following year
by the firm of Artaria. Like many of Mozart’s initially
‘difficult’ works, both quartets overcame early resistance
and made their way in France, England and Germany.
And on 30 November 1791, five days before Mozart’s
death, the critic of the Musikalische Korrespondenz der
Teutschen Filarmonischen Gesellschaft noted that the E
flat Quartet was ‘written with that fire of the imagination
and that correctness which has won for Herr M. the
reputation of one of the best composers in Germany’.
In the G minor Piano Quartet eighteenth-century
players and listeners had to contend not only with an
unfamiliar and technically demanding medium (both
string and keyboard parts would have been beyond most
amateurs), but also with one of Mozart’s most complex
and passionate first movements, permeated by its
implacable unison opening gesture. Though Mozart
sometimes treats the keyboard part in the virtuoso style of
his great Viennese piano concertos, the dialogues and
contrapuntal interplay between keyboard and strings—
above all in the strenuous development—are in the spirit
of true chamber music. After the first movement’s
turbulent coda, the B flat Andante, with its sensuous
chromaticism and delicately ornate passagework (shared