Horn Quintet in E flat major, K.407

One of Mozart’s best friends in Vienna was Joseph Ignaz Leutgeb, hornist and cheese-monger. It is not known whether the composer bought cheese from him but it is known that he valued him highly as a musician: he wrote as many as six concertos for him (although only three of the survive in their complete form) and it is more than likely that the Horn Quintet was intended for Leutgeb too. While he teased him mercilessly - “Wolfgang Amadé Mozart has taken pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox, and fool,” he wrote on the manuscript of the earliest of the concertos in 1783 - it is clear from the scoring of these works that he was no ordinary hornist. He was exceptionally accomplished, it seems, in using a hand-stopping technique to produce notes that, before the valve horn was invented, were just gaps in the scale as far as other hornists were concerned. That is presumably why, according to a contemporary report in the Mercure de France, he could “sing an Adagio as perfectly as the most mellow, interesting and accurate voice.”

The string ensemble in the Horn Quintet is not the standard quartet, such as Mozart was to use in the Clarinet Quintet seven years later, but a rare combination of violin, two violas, and cello. His purpose here must have been to darken the colour spectrum a little, so as not to make the horn seem heavy in comparison with its companions, and perhaps also to give the violin a higher profile than that of the other string instruments. Certainly, Mozart makes a point of presenting the horn and violin as duo partners from time to time - as in the second subject of the first movement, where melodic phrases are passed backwards and forwards between them, and at the end of the exposition, where the violin slyly mocks the horn’s predilection for repeated notes.

The tenderly scored slow movement is essentially an amorous duet for horn and violin, the former never less eloquent in expression or less flexible in chromatic phrasing than the latter. The opening theme of the Andante reappears, in a quicker tempo and in a different rhythmic shape, as the main theme of the last movement - a rondo which, keeping the horn indoors rather than taking it out hunting as the concerto rondos do, includes a self-contained episode in C minor as a timely contrast to the cheerful activity on either side of it.