Piano Quartet in E flat, K.493

Short of money, as he was increasingly wont to be during the last few years of his life, Mozart must have been delighted when Anton Hoffmeister, fellow composer and music publisher, commissioned him to write a set of three works for piano and string trio. The project did not work out, however. Mozart was far too good a composer to ignore the possibilities of what was then a new medium and tamely write the piano solo with string accompaniment that Viennese public would have expected. Indeed, he made such a brilliant job of integrating piano and strings in a true chamber-music texture in the Piano Quartet in G minor K.478 that Hoffmeister lost money on it. He refused to publish the Piano Quartet in E flat, which was already complete by then, and the third work in the series never got written. Artaria, the rival publishing firm that took a risk on the E flat major work, probably made nothing out of that score either. Only in the last movement, after the wonderfully well integrated Allegro and Larghetto, would Mozart’s contemporaries have found something to meet their expectations – a tuneful sonata-rondo which unambiguously features the piano as a virtuoso solo instrument. It took more than 50 years, in Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E flat Op.47, for Mozart’s new medium to find a worthy development and a future in the chamber-music repertoire.

Allegro

Larghetto

Allegretto

Short of money, as he was increasingly wont to be during the last few years of his life, Mozart must have been delighted when Anton Hoffmeister - fellow composer and music publisher - commissioned him to write a set of three works for piano and string trio. But if Hoffmeister expected Mozart to supply him with tame pieces that would slot neatly into his on-going series of music “for harpsichord or forte-piano” he underestimated his friend’s genius. Given a virtually new form to invent - the piano quartet combination was unknown in Vienna in 1785 - Mozart was not interested in writing the solo with accompaniment which was conventionally expected of mixed ensembles of keyboard and strings.

      Indeed, he made such a brilliant job of integrating piano and strings in a true chamber-music texture in the Piano Quartet in G minor, K.478, that Hoffmeister’s forte-piano players found little gratification in it, harpsichordists still less. The publisher lost money on it and, even though he had started to engrave the next work in the series, he decided to cut his losses and abandon the project. By mutual agreement Mozart kept the advance Hoffmeister had paid him and passed the new score to the rival house of Artaria, who published it in 1787.

    He seems to have passed it also to his English friend Stephen Storace, who published it in London in a series misleadingly called A Collection of Original Harpsichord Music. British harpsichordists and forte-piano players expecting the conventional keyboard-with-accompaniment format must have had the same kind of problems with the Piano Quartet in E flat as the Viennese with its predecessor in G minor. The main interest of the E flat major first movement, for example, is Mozart’s treatment of the second subject, which is introduced not by the piano but by the violin and which is then repeated by viola. The pianist, who accompanies all this with humble broken chords, doesn’t get to play that theme in its definitive form until well into the recapitulation. In the meantime the theme undergoes a harmonically and texturally adventurous development involving all four instruments on equal terms.

    The Larghetto    is similarly even-handed in the distribution of melodic interest. The piano takes the lead in presenting the serene first theme in A flat major - although even here there is a fair exchange of lyrical ideas with the violin - but it is the strings which introduce the disturbing element as a second subject in very quiet stealthy quavers. Again the new theme inspires the most interesting harmonies and dominates the development. In fact, it is only in the final Allegretto    that Mozart’s contemporaries would have found something to meet their expectations - a delightfully tuneful sonata-rondo which unambiguously features the piano as a virtuoso solo instrument.    The strings are not reduced to the role of accompanist exactly but they are certainly relegated to the background, from which they emerge only to make polite conversation and to provide the necessary colour contrast.