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MOZART_QUATUOR TALICH
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C
an we blame the fourteen-year-old Mozart for composing “a qua-
tro out of boredom” as his father Leopold put it? They were stuck in
a small town on their weary way to Milan and Bologna. Perhaps he
had already heard a quartet by Giuseppe Sammartini (1695-1750).
From 1770 to 1773, thirteen small “quatri” in the Italian style were produced.
These“Milanese” quartets seem fairly lightweight. But are they really? It is not
every adolescent who dares attempt such modulations and experiment with
chromaticism without risk of reprimand. The early quartets established his
writing rather like running in a piece of machinery. Composed on the basis
of regular intervals, with three movements, they deserve more than our dis-
tracted attention.
When he arrived in Vienna in 1773, Mozart probably already knew Haydn’s
opp. 17 and 20. Not until later did he meet the man who over twenty years
had created a new genre, the“Viennese quartet”.
He looked over the older man’s shoulder—he 17, the other 40—and took ins-
piration fromamaster. He actually copied like a craftsman and, to be honest,
with difficulty. The six quartets known as Viennese (K168 to K173) now had
four movements. The sometimes unbalanced scores were groping for their
own style, with borrowings and a spontaneous yet incomplete vitality. Deep
down, Mozart was too Italian fully to understand certain features, such as
Haydn’s odd minuets, ironic ancestors of the scherzo. Hard work and time
gave his technique greater flexibility and a certain patina: it gained in vir-
tuosity what it lost in innocence. Not until quartet K171 (1773) did Mozart free
himself to some extent from his model. No doubt disappointed at so much
effort for so little result, the composer turned away for a while from the idea
of further works of this sort.