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34 MOZART_TALICH QUARTET
His genius lay in his ability to transcend formulas and practices that others
had experimented with and perfected.
Over the course of his one hundred and four symphonies, Haydn formated
the genre with imagination and intuition. He was the father of classicism.
Yet Mozart, during the period in which he composed his six final symphonies
-written under the influence of his elder - unequivocally surpassed him. Just
listen to the
adagio
from the
Linz Symphony
, the finale from the
Prague
and
the
Jupiter
, or the first movement and especially the
Minuet
from the
40
th
in
G minor and you can fully grasp everything that made Amadeus inimitable,
eternal and therefore brilliant.
Haydn did the same for the quartet, composing eighty or so of them, as he
had done for the symphony. Listening to several of them gave Mozart such a
shock that it served as a catalyst for himto devote himself to them. But the six
quartets that he composed and dedicated to Haydn - whom he worshiped -
seem to belong to an entirely different world, different dramatically, different
in terms of sophistication.
To acknowledge his young
disciple’s amazing superiority is
in no way to belittle Haydn; he
admitted it himself.