Mozart: String Quintet in G minor, K. 516
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello in G Minor, K. 516 in 1787, a trying year for his professional floundering in Vienna, underwhelming creative output, and his father’s serious illness. Letters to his father from this period reveal Mozart’s despondent outlook, and this Viola Quintet seems to reflect his personal despair, set as it is in the same G minor that frames some of Mozart’s other anguished works, including Pamina’s heartbroken aria over her loss of love and joy in The Magic Flute.
The pained Allegro opens with our familiar, proto-Dvořákian texture of two violins paired with viola. But unlike in the Terzetto, Mozart has fashioned a decidedly transparent, weightless voicing, as if to give the violin’s climbing melody a chance to leave the cruel world. Not surprisingly, the illusion of escape is a ruse, and soon enough the lower strings pull the violin back to earth.
Resisting courtly dance traditions, the Menuetto movement shrieks at its opening and continues in a declamatory manner that foreshadows the analogous movement of the later G minor Symphony No. 40, but does concede a heartfelt, weeping Trio at its midpoint.
As in many of Mozart’s late works, the slow movement here seems the emotional anchor of the work as a whole. The velvety, muted tones turn the focus inward as this Adagio ma non troppo explores the intersection of beauty and sorrow, love and pain.
When, on the heels of the previous breathtaking slow movement, throbbing eight-notes reveal another Adagio, the effect is poetic and disorienting. The first violin laments a mournful aria in G minor, its unending phrases ridding us of delusions that a sunnier Allegro will ever chase away these dark clouds — until it does. Somehow, though, the Allegro respite seems contained, less raucous than Mozart’s more celebratory movements, as if tempered by the more sentient reality presented in the rest of the piece.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello in G Minor, K. 516 in 1787, a trying year for his professional floundering in Vienna, underwhelming creative output, and his father’s serious illness. Letters to his father from this period reveal Mozart’s despondent outlook, and this Viola Quintet seems to reflect his personal despair, set as it is in the same G minor that frames some of Mozart’s other anguished works, including Pamina’s heartbroken aria over her loss of love and joy in The Magic Flute.
The pained Allegro opens with our familiar, proto-Dvořákian texture of two violins paired with viola. But unlike in the Terzetto, Mozart has fashioned a decidedly transparent, weightless voicing, as if to give the violin’s climbing melody a chance to leave the cruel world. Not surprisingly, the illusion of escape is a ruse, and soon enough the lower strings pull the violin back to earth.
Resisting courtly dance traditions, the Menuetto movement shrieks at its opening and continues in a declamatory manner that foreshadows the analogous movement of the later G minor Symphony No. 40, but does concede a heartfelt, weeping Trio at its midpoint.
As in many of Mozart’s late works, the slow movement here seems the emotional anchor of the work as a whole. The velvety, muted tones turn the focus inward as this Adagio ma non troppo explores the intersection of beauty and sorrow, love and pain.
When, on the heels of the previous breathtaking slow movement, throbbing eight-notes reveal another Adagio, the effect is poetic and disorienting. The first violin laments a mournful aria in G minor, its unending phrases ridding us of delusions that a sunnier Allegro will ever chase away these dark clouds — until it does. Somehow, though, the Allegro respite seems contained, less raucous than Mozart’s more celebratory movements, as if tempered by the more sentient reality presented in the rest of the piece.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest