Composed 1786; 30 minutes

Mozart wrote two piano quartets, today cornerstones of the chamber music repertoire, both composed late in his short life. By 1785 he was at the height of his popularity with the Viennese music-lover, already well into a remarkable sequence of 17 piano concertos bringing, for the first time, the weight of symphonic thinking and the drama of opera to the genre. The piano trio had already found favor among affluent Viennese families with the leisure and means to engage in music-making. Mozart now brought the viola, his own favored instrument when playing chamber music, to his first Piano Quartet, K. 478—written a year before tonight’s quartet— hoping to appeal to the growing market for refined domestic music-making.

Recent research suggests that Mozart’s first piano quartet was well received upon publication in a subscription volume featuring works by various composers. Recalling the 1785 season, the Weimar Journal des Luxus und der Moden later appreciated the challenge of the work and which musicians might be equipped to deliver a successful performance. “In truth, one can hardly bear listening to this product of Mozart’s when it falls into mediocre, amateurish hands and is negligently played. What a difference when this much discussed work of art is performed in a quiet room by four skilled musicians who have studied it well.” Mozart’s first piano quartet was singled out for praise in Cramer’s December 1786 Magazin der Musik, and publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister recognized its market potential. 

Mozart began tonight’s piano quartet, the E-flat masterpiece K. 493, less than a year later, just a month after completing The Marriage of Figaro. He may have written it purely for artistic reasons or conceived it as a contrasting companion to K. 478 for performance in the same concert. In 1787, he entrusted the work to the publishers Artaria in Vienna and Storace in London. The first movement is buoyant and optimistic, its virtuosic piano writing closely related to Mozart’s great piano concertos, while the ensemble writing balances intimacy with brilliance. The slow movement is the quartet’s emotional centerpiece—a gentle, wistful meditation echoing the mood of the Countess’s Porgi amor in Figaro. Alfred Einstein famously called the finale’s theme “the purest, most childlike and godlike melody ever sung.” With these two quartets, Mozart virtually invented the genre; no true precedents existed. Writing just days before Mozart’s death on November 30, 1791, one critic recognized what Vienna had been slow to appreciate, noting that the E-flat Quartet displayed “that fire of the imagination and that correctness, which long since won for Herr Mozart the reputation as one of the finest composers in Germany.”