Mozart: String Quartet in F major, K.590 (Op. 18 No.3, 1789)
Allegro moderato
Allegretto (Andante)
Menuetto:- Allegretto
Allegro
Mozart supposedly wrote his last three quartets for Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia – a commission which the impoverished composer was only too glad to accept, although the money quickly disappeared on unsuccessful remedies for his wife’s current illness. The king was a highly gifted amateur cellist, and proud of his skill, so Mozart naturally felt obliged to produce cello parts that would give prominence to his playing (unlike Haydn in his Op.50 quartets, also for Friedrich Wilhelm). Quartet writing had generally taxed his powers – he himself described his six “Haydn” quartets as “the fruits of long and laborious labour”, and a letter to Michael Puchberg talks of “that exhausting labour”. The latter actually refers to the fact that this extra requirement for the cello made his task even more troublesome: the whole balance of the ensemble had to be reconsidered. What he achieved was an elevated string tone, and a resulting translucence of texture, which was quite novel (for Mozart, at least – not forgetting that the cellist composer Boccherini proved highly adept at giving himself similar prominence, resulting in comparably translucent sounds). In order to maintain a satisfactory balance both second violin and viola are given more prominent roles than usual – recalling the concertante quartets popularised in the 1760s by such composers as Carl Stamitz. All this also throws into that much greater relief those passages in which the cello returns to its more accustomed register.
It is often claimed that Mozart attached greater importance to the string quintet medium in the latter part of his life, so these “Prussian” quartets tend to be overshadowed by the four great quintets – and also by the six quartets dedicated to Haydn (completed before he started working seriously with an extra viola). But to suggest that they are “superficial in expression” (Eric Blom) is surely a misjudgement; it is true that they are slightly smaller in scale than most of the aforementioned works, and structurally less complex. This is precisely because the emphasis is more on beauty of sound and variety of texture, rather than on rigorous thematic development – not that there is any lack of inventiveness, as the outer movements of the F major happily demonstrate.
This is the last of the three quartets, and the one which least exploits the upper register of the king’s instrument – at least, after the first two movements. However, the “exhausting labour” had left its influence, in that the concertante element is still more developed here, reaching its apogee in the finale – a tour-de-force of instrumental virtuosity, and perhaps the hardest movement to play in all his chamber music for strings (apart, of course, from the Divertimento for string trio, K.563). Its difficulties are compounded by a not entirely uncharacteristic disregard for what is idiomatic and comfortably playable on violins and cellos: the running semiquaver figure which dominates the entire piece would fit much more readily on the piano, and it is constantly a matter for surprise that Mozart, the accomplished violin and viola player, so often seemed less sensitive than Haydn (and many more of his contemporaries) to how stringed instruments “work” most effectively. However, it is a pity if this occasional lack of consideration for his players has contributed to K.590 being the least often performed of the so-called “ten great quartets”, because in many ways it is the most original and forward looking of them all: many a bar or phrase anticipates Beethoven; and there are enough instances of quirkiness – harmonic and otherwise – to suggest that his imagination was reaching into new spheres (what other piece of Mozart’s ends quite like this first movement?).
In conclusion, it is worth noting that, despite the commonly accepted history of these quartets, it is only the first of them (K.575) which actually appears in Mozart’s own catalogue with reference to “His Majesty the King of Prussia”. It would appear from the above-mentioned letter to Michael Puchberg (from whom he was currently trying to borrow money!) that some of the payment he received for them had actually come from a different source, since he writes of an urgent need to have cash in hand. So it is probably true that he sold them elsewhere in a hurry. A similar fate befell the autographs of so many of his chamber works after his death – which resulted in years of inaccurate renditions of the composer’s exact intentions (e.g. the confusion over the tempo marking for K.590’s second movement). Evidently the most precious works of art can survive almost anything!
© Alan George
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