String Quintet in D major, K.593

Haydn never wrote a string quintet because, he said, “no one asked” him. There is just a possibility that, for at least the first two of his four mature masterpieces in the form, Mozart didn’t wait to be asked. He had written a String Quintet in B flat in Salzburg fifteen years earlier but the extraordinary quality of the Quintets in C major and G minor, both of them composed in Vienna in 1787, suggests a fresh and excited discovery of the structural and expressive potential offered by the addition of a second viola to the familiar string-quartet texture. But then he found he couldn’t sell the scores. He returned to the form three years later with the Quintet in D major, somewhat chastened in spirit but, it seems from the dedication of the first edition “to a Hungarian music lover,” with a commission.

Though rather shorter than either of its two predecessors, the Quintet in D is, in at least one respect, even more adventurous in construction. A slow introduction is rare in Mozart’s chamber music and there is no example of a later return of the slow tempo to compare with the recall of the Larghetto just before the end of the movement. Indeed, taken together, that event and the absence of a true second subject amount to a significant reshaping of sonata form. Another interesting feature of the Larghetto introduction is that the presence of the second viola liberates the cello from its normal duties and gives it time to think. The question it asks in the Larghetto it asks again in the dramatic second subject of the G major Adagio and, against the throbbing minor harmonies in the inner parts, the first violin attempts to answer. Reconciliation is achieved in the beautifully scored coda.

One reason for Mozart’s affection for the string quintet with two violas was his own preferred role as viola player in chamber in music. In spite of the characteristic richness of the viola colouring here, the cello retains its prominence even in the Menuetto, though with all due deference to the first violin of course. In the contrapuntal brilliance of the Finale - a sonata-form construction based almost exclusively on its intriguingly chromatic opening theme - five-part democracy is masterfully and entertainingly restored.