About this Piece

Mozart reaches his most breathtaking peaks of chamber-music inspiration in his late works for five instruments: the four quintets for strings, K. 515, K. 516, K. 593, and the generally underrated K. 614, all scored for string quartet with a second viola; and the Quintet for clarinet and string quartet, K. 581.

The notion of a string quintet with two violas was new in the 1770s, when Mozart wrote his first such work. After hearing Michael Haydn’s first string quintet (in C) in March 1773, 17-year-old Mozart plunged into these barely charted waters with his Quintet in B-flat, K. 174—hardly music to stand with his mature masterpieces, but a work of some consequence, with a greatly expressive slow movement. That Mozart took the work seriously is evidenced by the fact that he rewrote its last two movements after a two-month stay in Vienna, where he had been hugely impressed by the latest quartets of another Haydn, Michael’s older brother Joseph.

No concrete evidence exists as to the occasion(s) for which Mozart wrote the three string quintets of 1787, K. 515, K. 516, and K. 406/K. 516b, the last an arrangement of his wind octet, K. 388. The composer likely wrote them on speculation, “hoping to sell manuscript copies to amateurs by subscription,” according to musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon.

These were by no means the first large-scale works that Mozart had created on spec, but unlike the piano concertos of 1783, which quickly sold, the quintets were hardly snapped up by amateurs, who would have found them technically daunting. The composer was neither consciously catering to Vienna’s aristocratic salons nor being courted by them as the year 1787 waned. He finally sold them for a pittance to the publisher Artaria and Co.

The opening of K. 515, as the cello dances upward through light accompaniment, recalls the opening of Joseph Haydn’s “Bird” Quartet (Op. 33, No. 3), but thereafter the tone and texture are entirely Mozartian: the uniquely rich and mellow texture he created by emphasizing the inner voices (here, the two violas) that had been regarded as unnecessary “thickening” elements, even rude, by 18th-century listeners.

The pianist and writer Charles Rosen noted of K. 515’s opening that after that mounting cello phrase, there is “the same inner accompanying motion, the same placing of the first violin [as in Haydn’s ‘Bird’]. Yet Haydn’s nervous rhythm is avoided: In place of his independent six-measure phrases—the motion broken abruptly between them—Mozart has a linked series of five-measure phrases with absolutely uninterrupted continuity.”

The slow movement is one of Mozart’s seemingly effortless heartbreakers—in essence a dialogue between first violin and first viola. The minuet is elegant but by no means lightweight, with a chromatically tinged trio of grand proportions. The finale is a jubilant, elegant sublimation of feeling of the finest and strongest sort by a man who, while only 31 years old, was in the process of being discarded by those who had so recently set him on a pedestal.

—Herbert Glass