Introduction

Summary

Mozart's six string quartets dedicated to Joseph Haydn (K.387, K.421, K.428, K.458, K.464, K.465) are established keystones of the chamber music repertoire and frequently feature in concert programmes, broadcasts and recordings by the most prestigious professional ensembles. While brief accounts of these quartets have previously appeared in articles and books over the years, reflecting the changing agendas of several generations of musicologists and speaking to a diversity of readerships, no single book exists devoted to these seminal works.

The ‘Haydn’ set contains some of Mozart's most famous pieces (the ‘Hunt’ Quartet, K.458, and the ‘Dissonance’, K.465, for instance), works in which, according to Alfred Einstein, Mozart ‘completely found himself … music made of music’. These works embrace some of his most memorable melodic writing, and some of his most refined compositional thinking, often animated by counterpoint. It is true that counterpoint had been an important factor in some of his earlier quartets (K.155–60 and K.168–73), but it is arguably a weakness there, rather than a strength, since no attempt is made to integrate the strictly fugal writing into the prevailing ‘galant’ environment of elegant melodies supported by simple harmonies within a symmetrical, even predictable, periodic framework. The result is a rather uncomfortable disjunction of different expressive types, representative of a real stylistic crisis during the early 1770s.

That crisis required for its resolution a new way of integrating the melodic and harmonic elements of the emerging classical style so that neither was a mere passive support for the other.