Mozart’s precocious virtuosity on the keyboard is legendary. That he was also a child prodigy on the violin—the instrument on which is father, Leopold, built his reputation—is less well known. In one of his cockier moments, he boasted that he had played a certain piece “as though I were the greatest fiddler in all of Europe.” As time went on, however, it seems he fell out of practice and took up the violin and viola only in the privacy of domestic chamber music sessions. Irish tenor Michael Kelly attended a quartet party in Vienna at which Mozart played viola to Haydn’s first violin. He recalled that “the players were tolerable,” although “not one of them excelled on the instrument he played.” Even so, Kelly added, “a greater treat, or a more remarkable one, cannot be imagined.”
The G-Major Duo dates from the summer of 1783, when Mozart was riding high on the success of his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail and hard at work on the six string quartets that he planned to dedicate to Haydn. Two years earlier, he had left the employ of Prince-Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg to become a freelance composer and pianist in Vienna. In 1782, he further asserted his independence by marrying Constanze Weber over his father’s objections, and it was partly to make amends that the young couple visited Leopold in Salzburg the following year. Archbishop Colloredo, an amateur violinist and chamber music enthusiast, had commissioned a half-dozen pieces for violin and viola from his court organist, Michael Haydn (Joseph’s younger brother). When Haydn, indisposed, fell behind schedule, the archbishop reportedly threatened to hold back his pay. Mozart generously came to his rescue by tossing off a pair of duos, K. 423 and K. 424, which the ailing composer added to his four to complete the set. Colloredo was apparently none the wiser, and Haydn was restored to his good graces.
Mozart’s fondness for the warm, burnished timbre of the viola is evident in the two duos, which are as light in spirit as they are in texture. He clearly enjoyed the challenge of creating a kind of pseudo-polyphony with restricted forces, much as Bach had in his works for solo violin and cello. (Mozart had recently been introduced to the Baroque master’s music at the salon of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a noted musical antiquarian and patron.) In the opening Allegro of the G-Major Duo, the violin and viola conduct a lively, evenhanded dialogue—one beginning a thought, the other finishing it—with just enough double-stopping and chordal writing (both expressed and implied) to put flesh on the music’s harmonic bones. The Adagio, a long-breathed arioso in C major, hints at weightier emotions in a string of poignant suspensions that anticipate the darker-hued episodes of the Rondeau. But it is the catchy recurring theme of the finale—unalloyed sweetness and light—that Mozart sends us home humming.
Dohnányi is recognized today as a seminal figure in Hungarian music, a link between Liszt’s outsized romanticism and Bartók’s edgy modernism. At the outset of his career, however, he was widely thought to be in the line of succession to Brahms. When the German composer heard Dohnányi’s Op. 1 Piano Quintet in 1895, he famously declared, “I could not have written it better myself.” Brahms subsequently arranged a private performance of the work in Vienna with the 18-year-old Hungarian at the keyboard. Dohnányi was already a celebrated concert pianist by the time he attended Brahms’s funeral in 1897 as an official representative of his country, and he was acknowledged to have few peers as an interpreter of Brahms’s music. Inevitably, it took Dohnányi some time to emerge from Brahms’s shadow, especially in light of his close friendships with violinist Joseph Joachim, composer Karl Goldmark, critic Eduard Hanslick, and other members of Brahms’s circle.
If the Piano Quintet is the most overtly Brahmsian of Dohnányi’s works, the Serenade for String Trio, composed in Vienna seven years later, betrays its debt to the German master in subtler ways. Brahms’s influence can be felt, for instance, in the disciplined clarity of the trio’s formal structure: The generic titles of its five short movements hark back to the classical models that Brahms revered. Significantly, when members of the Fitzner Quartet premiered the Serenade in the Austrian capital on January 5, 1904, Dohnányi chose to round out the program by joining them in a performance of Brahms’s A-Major Piano Quartet.
To note these deep-seated influences, however, is not to suggest that Dohnányi’s Serenade sounds in any way derivative. The brisk, purposeful stride of the opening Marcia whisks us into territory that seems both comfortingly familiar and refreshingly new. The very brevity of the movement—it lasts less than two minutes—marks a clear break from Brahms’s more expansive introductions. Dohnányi barely has time to broach his second subject—an angular, Hungarian-style tune played by the violin and cello in turns against a march-like accompaniment figure in the viola—before the movement slams to a stop on a fortissimo C-major chord. The Romanza weaves two themes together in similar fashion. Its impassioned, rhapsodic midsection is framed by two statements of a gently arching melody introduced by the viola and echoed by the violin. Next comes a quirky Scherzo in which the elements are reversed, an outer layer of spiky chromatic counterpoint enclosing a sweetly lyrical core. The fourth and most substantial movement is a set of variations on a 16-bar theme. Initially presented by all three players in a homophonic setting, the melody gradually takes on a more complex symphonic character. A helter-skelter Rondo brings the Serenade full circle with its valedictory allusion to the first movement’s strutting Hungarian theme.
In December 1890, Brahms presented his publisher with the manuscript of his Second String Quintet, accompanied by a terse message: “With this slip, bid farewell to notes of mine.” As it turned out, the composer’s valedictory was premature; he soon got a fresh wind and went on to pen some of his most beguiling works, including the Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Quintet, the Four Serious Songs, and the late intermezzi for solo piano. Yet it surely says something about Brahms’s psychological state that he chose to designate this lighthearted, energetic work as his swan song. His close friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg put her finger on the quintet’s special quality when Brahms sent her a manuscript copy of the score: “I was so inspired by your earlier Quintet in F Major,” she wrote the composer, “that the new one seemed to stand but a poor chance (old friends are the best!); but I am now faithless enough to admit that it surpasses the older work in beauty, grace, and depth of feeling … The quintet held me from the very start and I found myself back in the atmosphere of the G-Major Sextet. It is all wonderfully clear and compact, distinct in its manner of expression.”
The renowned Rosé Quartet, supplemented by a second violist, gave the first performance of the G-Major Quintet in Vienna on November 11, 1890. Some critics remained impervious to its charms. One complained that “the themes, although treated so effectively and elaborately, seem nonetheless more and more thought rather than felt, more constructed than discovered. One is so seldom in one’s innermost soul touched by Brahms.” Nevertheless, the popular verdict was nothing short of ecstatic, echoing Herzogenberg’s exclamation that “he who can invent all this must be in a happy frame of mind! It is the work of a man of 30!” When an ensemble led by Joseph Joachim introduced the quintet in Berlin on December 10, the audience was so demonstrative that the violinist was forced—“against my principles,” as he pointedly reminded Brahms—to encore the slow movement.
The Op. 111 Quintet opens in a blaze of youthful high spirits, the cello’s strenuous melody struggling to surface from underneath a flood of 16th notes in the four upper voices. (One cellist protested that the passage was unplayable as written, but Brahms stubbornly refused to make any concessions.) A quietly lilting second theme provides a wistful contrast, and the sky darkens momentarily in the magically ethereal development section, but the movement’s exhilarating energy proves irrepressible. A plangent and richly expressive Adagio in D minor (highlighting the baritonal timbre of the violas) leads to a restless, waltz-like Allegretto that flits between G minor and G major. The final Vivace has a rollicking gypsy flavor. When Brahms’s biographer Max Kalbeck suggested that the quintet be subtitled “Brahms in the Prater,” alluding to Vienna’s famous urban playground, the composer reportedly shot back, “You’ve got it! Among all the pretty girls, eh?”
—Harry Haskell
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