Mozart & Beethoven — quintets for piano and wind
Mozart’s grand musical academies of the 1780s typically included symphonies, arias, concertos and keyboard improvisations-in Vienna, chamber music was rarely, if ever, heard in the concert hall. The performance of a newly composed quintet for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon (K452) at Mozart’s Burgtheater concert of 1 April 1784 was therefore something of a novelty. At the same time, however, the performance of the quintet was not an out-and-out abandonment of local concert conventions: cast in three movements, the work represents a hybridisation of the brilliant concerto style cultivated by Mozart in the spring of 1784 (K449, 450, 451 and 453), the intimacy of his recent chamber music (including three of the quartets eventually dedicated to Haydn, K387, 421 and 428), and the unique aural universe of the Viennese wind serenades (K361, 375 and 388). With its rich harmonies and textures, virtuosic piano part, and the piano’s constant dialogue with the rest of the ensemble, K452 can be understood, in the context of this particular concert, as a substitute concerto. The performance was a resounding success, not only with the public but with Mozart himself. Barely ten days later, on 10 April, he wrote to his father: ‘I played two grand concertos [K450 and K451] and then a quintet, which was applauded extraordinarily; I myself consider it the best work I have composed in my life... I only wish you could have heard it; — and how beautifully it was performed!’
Among the mysteries attached to the work — the quintet is a composition whose history is not in every respect clear — is that of its double ending: Mozart’s autograph includes a separate leaf on which he notated four bars apparently intended to replace the finale’s original seven-bar conclusion. This alternate version is curiously attenuated and musically unsatisfactory — perhaps that is why Mozart never cancelled the original ending in his autograph. In any case, the revision seems not to have been taken seriously: all early manuscript copies, editions and arrangements of the quintet transmit the original ending.
The after-life of the quintet, as well as its autograph, is similarly curious. According to an anecdote said to derive from Constanze, and first published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung for 6 February 1799:
A Polish Count was present for a Sunday musical gathering at which Mozart performed and, like the entire audience, was completely enchanted by a new quintet for piano and winds. He told Mozart as much, and expressed his wish that Mozart would sometime compose for him a trio for flute. Mozart promised to do so when he had the chance. As soon as the Count returned home, he sent Mozart 100 gold half-sovereigns (150 Imperial ducats) and a very complimentary note, thanking him for the great pleasure. Mozart was grateful and in return sent him the original score of the quintet, which he otherwise never did, and recounted to his friends with enthusiasm this pleasant experience. The Count was [subsequently] away, but a year later came to Mozart again, asking for his trio. Mozart answered that he had not yet felt himself inclined to compose something worthy of the Count. The Count replied: And perhaps you will not feel inclined to return my 100 gold half-sovereigns, which I paid to you in advance for the trio. It will be remembered that, in the above-cited letter, the money was given as nothing more than a token of the Count’s admiration and thanks for his great pleasure. Mozart — angry but noble — paid him the money. The Count kept the original score [of the quintet] and some time later it was published by Artaria as a quartet for piano, violin, viola and violoncello, without Mozart’s authorisation.
There are reasons to distrust this anecdote. Shortly after its publication, Haydn’s biographer August Griesinger wrote to Breitkopf & Härtel: ‘It is said that Mozart’s widow will not vouch for the authenticity of the anecdotes published in the Music-Zeitung’. And barely five years later Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, editor of the Allgemeine musicalische Zeitung, republished the story (21 December 1803) but in a garbled version, allegedly from a French source (in fact C. F. Cramer’s French translation of Rochlitz, published as Anecdotes sur W. G. Mozart [sic] in Paris in 1801.) Apparently, Rochlitz did not recognise his own handiwork.
On the other hand, the fate of Mozart’s autograph is atypical. Not only was it not among the scores found in the composer’s estate at the time of his death in 1791, but, just as Rochlitz’s anecdote claimed, the quintet was first published by Artaria in Vienna as a piano quartet (although this was in 1794 and the question of Mozart’s authorisation is consequently moot; the original version of K452 was first published in 1800). Could the anecdote whatever its source, have some basis in fact?
These minor mysteries are only part of a larger story: the long shadow cast by K452 over Beethoven’s similarly scored quintet, Op.16. In several respects, the works share a ‘joint’ history. Is it mere chance that the first publication of Mozart’s quintet coincided with Beethoven’s earliest work on Op.16? For although the earliest documented reference to this work is a performance given by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh at Jahn’s rooms (where Mozart also frequently played) on 6 April 1797, the Kinsky catalogue speculates that it might have been started as early as 1794. And is it merely coincidence that Beethoven did not publish his quintet until 1801, when Mozart’s work suddenly reappeared in Viennese concert programmes after what was undoubtedly a lapse of several years? The first of these performances of Mozart’s quintet took place on 4 April 1800, at a concert given by a certain Herr Grohmann and a Herr Formaizko, the second on 25 March 1801, at a concert put on by Mozart’s pupil Josepha Auernhammer. The earlier of these dates in particular is significant: the Grohmann-Formaizko concerto took place barely two days after Beethoven’s first-ever public academy in Vienna (the programme included a Mozart symphony and Haydn arias, in addition to several works by Beethoven, among them the Septet Op.20). Perhaps it was the resurgence in performances of Mozart’s quintet that finally spurred Beethoven to publish his own work. And when he did do so, it appeared, like Mozart’s, in versions for both piano quartet and piano and wind quintet. One final coincidence needs to be mentioned here: on 30 May 1800 Constanze Mozart wrote to the publisher Johann Anton André: ‘H. v. Zmeskal, secretary of the Hungarian Chancellery here, has the original of [the] piano quintet.’ Nikolaus Zmeskall, a minor Hungarian composer and from 1784 secretary to the Hungarian Chancellery in Vienna, was an amateur cellist and close friend of Beethoven’s — sufficiently close, in fact, to be the dedicatee of Beethoven’s F minor Quartet Op.95.
There are other reasons to think K452 was something of a red flag to Beethoven. By all accounts, Mozart’s prestige — and the common belief that Beethoven represented his ‘successor’ — was never far from the young composer’s mind. As early as 1783 Christian Gottlob Neefe, Beethoven’s teacher in Bonn, published an article in Carl Friedrich Cramer’s Magazin der Musik claiming that Beethoven ‘would surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were he to continue as he has begun’; and in 1792, on the eve of his departure for Vienna, his patron Ferdinand Count Waldstein penned a message that was to haunt Beethoven for years: ‘You are now going to Vienna in fulfilment of a wish that has so long been thwarted. The genius of Mozart still mourns and weeps for the death of its pupil. It has found a refuge in the inexhaustible Haydn, but no occupation; through him it desires once more to find a union with someone. Through your unceasing diligence, receive Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Haydn’ (Hans Gerstinger, Ludwig van Beethovens Stammbuch, Leipzig, 1927).
The psychological hurdle posed by Mozart for Beethoven during his early Viennese years is attested to by numerous contradictory anecdotes. On the one hand, Beethoven is reputed to have claimed that he never heard a note by Mozart. This is patently false: Beethoven had played Mozart’s operas while a viola player in the Bonn court orchestra; he had performed the concerto K466 at a benefit concert mounted by Constanze Mozart in 1796; and in the late 1790s, when he was working on his first set of quartets (Op.18) he copied out numerous passages from Mozart’s works, in particular the G major and A major quartets, K387 and 464. On the other hand, Beethoven is also reported to have said to Johann Baptist Cramer with respect to the C minor concerto K491 that neither of them was capable of composing such a work.
It does not really matter whether these anecdotes are, in their particulars, true or false: it is what they tell us about Beethoven’s fundamental ambivalence toward Mozart and his music that counts. Yet this did not prevent Beethoven from remaining true to his own voice, some obvious modellings of his quintet on Mozart’s notwithstanding: their keys and unusual scoring are identical, and both begin with elaborate slow introductions. At 416 bars, however, the first movement of Beethoven’s quintet far exceeds Mozart’s in scale: as in so many of his chamber and solo works, Beethoven aspires to the symphonic, something that is alien to Mozart’s greater intimacy and concision.
Article reproduced with the permission of Cliff Eisen.