Life Of Mozart, Vol. 3 (of 3) by Otto Jahn

NEXT to pianoforte music for amateur musical entertainments, the quartet for stringed instruments was the favourite form of chamber music. The performers were occasionally highly cultivated amateurs, but more often professional musicians, thus giving scope for more pretentious compositions. The comparatively small expense involved enabled others besides noblemen, even those of the citizen class who were so inclined, to include quartet-playing among their regular entertainments. 1 Jos. Haydn was, as is well known, the musician who gave to the quartet its characteristic form and development. 2 Other composers had written works for four stringed instruments, but the string quartet in its well-defined and henceforth stationary constitution was his creation, the result of his life-work. It is seldom that an artist has been so successful in discovering the fittest outcome for his individual productiveness; the quartet was Haydn's natural expression of his musical nature. The freshness and life, the cheerful joviality, which are the main characteristics of his compositions, gained ready and universal acceptance for them. Connoisseurs and critics, it is true, were at first suspicious, and even contemptuous, of this new kind of music; and it was only gradually that they became aware that depth and earnestness of feeling, as well as knowledge and skill, existed together with humour in Haydn's quartets. He went on his way, however, untroubled MOZART'S INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC. [2] by the critics, and secured the favour and adherence of the public by an unbroken series of works: whoever ventured on the same field was obliged to serve under his banner.
The widespread popularity of quartet music in Vienna could not fail to impel Mozart to try his forces in this direction. His master was also his attached friend and fellow-artist, with whom he stood in the position, not of a scholar, but of an independent artist in noble emulation. The first six quartets belong to the comparatively less numerous works which Mozart wrote for his own pleasure, without any special external impulse. They are, as he says in the dedication to Haydn, the fruit of long and earnest application, and extended over a space of several years. The first, in G major (387 K.), was, according to a note on the autograph manuscript, written on December 31, 1782; the second, in D minor (421 K.), in June, 1783, during Constanze's confinement (Vol. II., p. 423); and the third, in E flat major (428 K.), belongs to the same year. After a somewhat lengthy pause he returned with new zeal to the composition of the quartets; the fourth, in B flat major (458 K.), was written November 9, 1784; the fifth, in A major (464 K.), on January 10; and the last, in C major (465 K.), on January 14, 1785. It was in February of this year that Leopold Mozart paid his visit to Vienna. He knew the first three quartets, Wolfgang having sent them to him according to custom; and he heard the others at a musical party where Haydn was also present; the warmly expressed approbation of the latter may have been the immediate cause of Mozart's graceful dedication, when he published the quartets during the autumn of 1785