CCCLXII. MOZART, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-1791)
Keep in mind that a composer's relationship to any particular publisher depends on an understanding that the work would sell to amateur musicians, who -- depending on their abilities -- wanted something fresh and new to play after the servants had cleared the table ...
Franz Anton Hoffmeister -- two years Mozart's senior -- studied law in Vienna; then decided to become a composer; then set up his own publishing house the year of this composition.
He commissioned three piano quartets -- the first work ever written for such a combination of instruments, it is believed -- and was nonplussed when he realized what difficulties the work would impose upon the average amateur.
An article in a music magazine a few laters later confirmed his feelings:
"As performed by amateurs, the work could not please: everybody yawned with boredom over the incomprehensible tintamarre of four instruments which did not keep together for four bars on end, and whose senseless concentus never allowed any unity of feeling; but it had to please, it had to be praised! What a difference when this much-advertised work of art is performed with the highest degree of accuracy by four skilled musicians who have studied it carefully."
Hoffmeister allowed Mozart to keep the advance and released him any further obligation. Busy at work on Figaro [see Post CCLXXXVI], he immediately returned to the form after the opera's completion with another -- the E-Flat Major, K. 493.
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First Movement
First Movement
In a perfectly symmetrical eight-bar phrase, Mozart posits the serious G Minor theme -- two bars of unison, and a two-bar "response" in the piano, which ends on the dominant in Bar 4 and the tonic in Bar 8:
The development shifts to the subdominant (C Minor):
This bar is particularly lovely with its confluence of 1/8th-notes:
Second Movement
Relative Major (B-Flat) moving to F Major. A really beautiful slow movement, with Mozart giving carefully corresponding parts in all four instruments:
Thrid Movement
In the parallel major (G) ...
Mozart orchestrates this happy rondo with a specific pattern:
Starting with eight bars of solo piano, eight bars of tutti, eight bars of piano, and eight bars of strings only:
Later it's just a two-bar call-and-response:
and then one-bar:
and before he wraps things up, he shocks us with this deceptive cadence:
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