String Quintet in B flat major K.174 (1773)

The String Quintet Mozart wrote in Salzburg in his teens is scored for the same instruments – two violins, two violas, cello – ­as the great quintets he was to ompose in Vienna in his thirties. It does not, however, belong to the same tradition. Almost certainly stimulated by two recent quintet Notturni by the Salzburg composer Michael Haydn, it is associated more with the divertimento than with true chamber music of the kind that Michael’s older brother, Joseph Haydn, was so successfully developing in his quartets at that time.

Even so, the Quintet in B flat anticipates much that is characteristic of the later quintets, not least the composer’s evident delight in the colour potential offered by two violas. The presence of a second viola means that the first is free to interact with the first violin, as it does when it takes up the opening theme or joins with the violin in recalling the second subject later on in the first movement. The Adagio is particularly attractive in colouring, the violins either retreating to give prominence to the violas or engaging in dialogue with them. No less resourcefully, the Trio section of the minuet regularly exchanges the material between two duos, first violin and first viola on the one hand and second violin and second viola on the other. The one instrument that misses out amid all this textural enterprise is the cello – until, that is, it is drawn into the hectic contrapuntal activity motivated by the theme in semiquavers which makes an early entry in the last movement and which remains a potent source of energy into the closing bars.