String Quartet in D major K499 (Mozart)
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The String Quartet in D Major written in 1786 in Vienna by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and published by — if not indeed written for — his friend Franz Anton Hoffmeister (usually given the KV number 499) is a work in four movements:
- Allegretto, in D major
- Menuetto: Allegretto, in D major, with a trio section in D minor
- Adagio, in G major
- Allegro, in D major
(For an explanation of these terms see the article tempo.)
This work, sandwiched between the six quartets he dedicated to Joseph Haydn (1782–5) and the following three Prussian quartets (1789–90), intended to be dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia (the first edition bore no dedication, however), is often polyphonic in a way uncharacteristic of the earlier part of the classical music era.* The menuetto and its trio give good examples of this in brief, with the brief irregular near-canon between first violin and viola in the second half of the main portion of the minuet, and the double imitations (between the violins, and between the viola and cello) going on in the trio, but this is only an example, just as this is only one particularly noticeably remarkable quality of this singleton quartet.
*Which knew — to paraphrase Alfred Einstein in his book Mozart, His Character, His Work, who regards this as one of Mozart's contributions — only two styles, the galant style of melody over bare accompaniment on the one hand, and the wooden contrappunto osservato with which they attempted to evoke Renaissance polyphony, but very rarely could consider combining them let alone bending them at the edges.)
[edit] References
Einstein, Alfred. Mozart, His Character, His Work. London: Oxford University Press. First Edition: 1945. Translated from the German by Arthur Mendel and Nathan Broder.
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