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MOZART_QUATUOR TALICH
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This perfect balance of individualised voices aroused interest and the desire
for perfection. The Haffner Symphony and Idomeneo could not be composed
without an absolute sense of proportion.
Haydn’s op. 33 set of six quartets of 1781 was the model to match. Mozart
rose to the friendly challenge with extreme attention to detail: from the first
G major quartet, K387, in 1782 there were more dynamic markings. The new
scores were written, as the composer put it,“in a completely new and special
way”. Indeed. Their apparent simplicity conceals a texture of innovative
complexity adorned with elements borrowed from the songs and dances of
central Europe. The manuscripts reveal the feverish process of the writing,
with erasures and doubts unusual in a man who usually only consigned a
work to paper once it was completed in his head. ForMozart had also to learn
the rigour of counterpoint and themodels he discovered in 1782 when he read
Johann Sebastian Bach’s music.
In the final years of his life, Mozart took even further this genre he found so
arduous and whose depths he discovered in the confession of his feelings.
His quartets, after all, were only intended for private hearing; he could hardly
imagine the public devotion they would receive in the following centuries.
The Hoffmeister Quartet, K499, the sole example of an individual score,
revealed the ambiguity of the emotions that assailed him, which he could
more easily dissimulate in his piano concerti. Its spontaneous vitality
and use of homophony were combined with the scholarly exploration of
counterpoint. By 1786 Mozart had adopted a liberty of tone that Haydn could