Piano and Wind Quintet in E flat major Op.16

There is no greater tribute to Mozart’s Piano and Wind Quintet in E flat than Beethoven’s attempt to emulate it in his own Quintet for the same instruments in the same key. It is no discredit to Beethoven, however, if he failed to equal Mozart’s example, let alone surpass it: Beethoven was 26 when he wrote his Piano and Wind Quintet; Mozart was not only two years older when he wrote his but also much more mature and experienced as a composer. Besides, the Beethoven work, which was first performed in Vienna in 1797, has its own distinctive qualities. Perhaps the most striking feature of all is the ambitious scale of the first movement with its extended slow introduction, its melodic abundance in the main Allegro section, and its inspired coda featuring a virtuoso passage for the horn shortly before the end.

There is another prominent horn episode in the Andante cantabile – not in the lyrical outer sections based on a possibly unconscious memory of Zerlina’s aria “Batti, batti” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni but in the middle section where the harmonies and the mood abruptly change and the horn twice gives expressive voice to its anxiety. When the opening material is recalled it is even more appealing in its newly elaborated scoring.

Unlike Mozart, who favours the oboe among the woodwind instruments in his Piano and Wind Quintet, Beethoven apparently prefers the clarinet. Certainly, he does in the first movement, where the clarinet usually leads the wind entries after a piano solo. The Andante cantabile goes some way to correcting the situation with its lovely oboe and bassoon solos in the opening section. The closing Rondo, on the other hand, tends to offer a different kind of texture. The wind instruments are still led by the clarinet but they are treated here not so much as individuals but as a group – sometimes quite dramatically, as in a harmonically aggressive passage following a piano cadenza and the first return of the main theme, and sometimes in a lively counterpoint. But, of course, as in the Mozart Quintet, it is the piano part, written for the composer himself to play, that steals the show.

Gerald Larner ©2003