String Quartet No. 20 (Mozart)

The String Quartet in D major, K. 499, was written in 1786 in Vienna by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It was published by – if not indeed written for – his friend Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Because of this, the quartet has acquired the nickname Hoffmeister. Hoffmeister had started issuing a series of chamber-music publications in 1785, including Mozart's K. 499 as well as Joseph Haydn's Op. 42.[1]

First nine bars of the Allegretto

Structure

There are four movements:

  1. Allegretto, in D major
  2. Menuetto: Allegretto, in D major, with a trio section in D minor
  3. Adagio, in G major
  4. Allegro, in D major

This work, sandwiched between the six quartets he dedicated to Joseph Haydn (1782–5) and the following three Prussian Quartets (1789–90), intended to be dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia [lower-alpha 1], is often polyphonic in a way uncharacteristic of the earlier part of the classical music era. The menuetto and its trio give good examples of this in brief, with the brief irregular near-canon between first violin and viola in the second half of the main portion of the minuet, and the double imitations [lower-alpha 2] going on in the trio.

See also

References
Notes
  1. The first edition bore no dedication, however.
  2. Between the violins, and between the viola and cello.
  1. Grave & Grave 2006, p. 219
Sources
  • Einstein, Alfred (1945). Mendel, Arthur; Broder, Nathan (eds.). Mozart, His Character, His Work (1st ed.). London: Oxford University Press.
  • Grave, Floyd; Grave, Margaret G (2006). The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-517357-4.
  • Seiffert, Wolf-Dieter, ed. (2016). Mozart - String Quartets Volume: IV (PDF). G. Henle Verlag. ISMN 979-0-2018-7123-3.
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