Clarinet Quartet in E flat major, Op.19, No.1

The Mannheim court orchestra, in which Carl Stamitz played violin in the 1760s, was not only one of the most accomplished ensembles of its kind but also one of the best equipped. Carl’s father Johann Stamitz, violinist and composer of dozens of early examples of the progressive “Mannheim symphony,” had developed its string playing to an unequalled level of excellence and his successors had maintained the tradition. The Elector Carl Theodor spared no expense moreover in recruiting the best wind instrumentalists for his orchestra, including - as Mozart was to note with envy when he visited Mannheim in 1777 - clarinettists. Indeed, he played the clarinet himself. That could be one reason why Carl Stamitz wrote no fewer than ten concertos for clarinet, as well as much chamber music featuring the clarinet, at a time when it was not generally regarded as a solo instrument or even as a regular member of the orchestra.

As it happened, in writing chamber music for clarinet and string trio rather than clarinet and string quartet, Stamitz just missed out in anticipating what was to become the combination so successfully adopted by Mozart, Weber and Brahms in their Clarinet Quintets. Even so, in the four Clarinet Quartets among the six works published as Op.19 in Paris in 1779, he did anticipate later developments in his resourceful and thoroughly idiomatic writing for the instrument. Structurally, the first two movements of the Quartet in E flat major anticipate later developments too. The opening Allegro is not exactly in classical Viennese sonata form, in that only the second subject is recapitulated, but the basic pattern is much the same. It goes its own way, however, at the end of the slow movement, where it passes directly into a lively German dance which returns at the end of the work after a second (Andante moderato) slow movement and a tuneful little Allegretto.

Gerald Larner©