String Quartet in D major, K.575

The earliest of the three quartets dedicated to Friedrich Wilhelm II, the cello-playing King of Prussia, is a rare structural achievement in that it not only shifts the centre of gravity from the first movement to the last but also links the two firmly together. The long-term key to the Quartet in D major is the quietly expansive melody in the first violin part in the opening bars. While the Andante and the Menuetto have their own distinctive material, the closing Allegretto is based almost exclusively on a compressed version, introduced by cello, of the main theme of the first Allegretto.

If there is anything less than perfect about the six String Quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn in 1785 it is that those “fruits of long and laborious effort” are a little too self-conscious in places. Five years later he dedicated to Friedrich Wilhelm II, the cello-playing King of Prussia, a set of three Quartets that seem entirely spontaneous in every expressive and technical respect. Even so, the present work, the earliest of the Prussian Quartets, is a rare structural achievement in that it not only shifts the centre of gravity from the first movement to the last but also links the two firmly together.

The long-term key to the Quartet in D major is the quietly expansive melody in the first violin part in the opening bars - or, rather, the more functional version of it, with the first three notes compressed into one bar, which is introduced by the second violin near the end of the exposition. Mozart makes little of the diminished version of the main theme in this first Allegretto, referring to it once on viola in the development and then withholding it until the appropriate point in the recapitulation. It makes no appearance at all in either of the middle movements, both of which are generous in indulging Friedrich Wilhelm II’s interest in the cello. The Andante is based on a not very distant variant of a tune familiar from the song Das Veilchen and the Menuetto has its own, at one point rhythmically disruptive, agenda.

The last Allegretto, however, is based almost exclusively on the diminished version of the main theme of the first Allegretto. The cellist presents it as a rondo theme in the opening bars, after which it is recalled three times in its original key of D major and on innumerable occasions, in whole or in part, in the effortlessly brilliant contrapuntal episodes and the teasingly evasive coda.

Allegretto

Andnate

Menuetto: allegretto

Allegretto

… six years later, in the first of his Prussian set, Mozart made a very deliberate and thorough strategy of linking the outer movements. In so doing, he changed the shape of the string quartet as the eighteenth century knew it, transferring the structural weight from the first movement to the finale.

In this case, considering what he was going to do with it, it is not surprising that Mozart drew on an unfinished work of 1770 for the begining of this Quartet in D major, K.575. It is a simple and well defined theme - a stretched-out upward arpeggio of D major and a scalic descent - capable of development (as Schubert also demonstrates in the first movement of his Symphony No.2 in B flat). Its introduction does not, incidentally, feature Friedrich Wilhelm’s cello. The second subject does but this is so much the less important theme in the long term, less important even than the little chromatic figure and the turn associated with the first subject, and certainly less important then the second violin’s diminution of the first first subject towards the end of the recapitulation.

Significantly, Mozart does not develop the main theme at this stage. The closing theme of the exposition, a new melody in G major, the chromatic figures, all receive more extensive treatment than the main theme, which is represented only by two allusions to its diminution.

Having slightly reduced the role of the cellist in the recapitulation of the first movement, by presenting the second subject in different colours, Mozart indulges him in the slow movement. Although the main theme - a beautifully scored version of the song Das Veilchen - is introduced by the first and second violins, the effortless melodic improvision which stands for the second subject is led by the cello, as is the reprise of Das Veilchen. Realistically, Mozart offers only a nominal recapitulation of the second-subject material, the essence of which is its spontaneity.

It is another indication of Mozart’s developing concern for thematic unity that he integrates the Menuetto and Trio with such care. But, of course, the most striking aspect of the work from that point of view is that the last movement is based on the same theme as the first movement, in a rather more sophisticated version of its diminution. This last Allegretto is slightly shorter than the first but is very much more concentrated. Whereas in the first movement Mozart was relucant to develop his mian theme, here he can scarcely put it down. Once the cello has introduced it, as the main theme of a sonata-rondo structure, it is nearly always present at one level of the texture or another. There is only one other theme, which is little more than an exceptionally pretty cadence in A major. It does not have an episode to itself and it is not developed. It is, however, recapitulated in the tonic, before the main theme makes its most sonorously scored but by no means its last appearance.