MOZART'S OUTER LIMITS

Imagine the first and the last of Mozart's String Quintets together on a single recording so that listeners might both enjoy their felicities and learn something about the path taken by the composer's style between his late teens and the year he died. What a chance!

Mozart was only 17 (and still living at home in his father's house in Salzburg) when he wrote the B-flat major Quintet now known as K. 174. Since his wunderkind years had passed, young Wolfgang was more or less taken for granted and had few prospects beyond service to the archbishop. It must have been a terrible comedown for him to ac­cept this fate after having been the darl­ing of Europe's crowned heads and the recipient of important honors. Yet, works flowed from his pen with astonishing fecundity.

To realize what a phenomenon this boy was, think of any 17-year-old you known and consider that this one already had 173 works to his credit: symphonies, divertimenti, variations, sonatas, quartets, and operas! Music was something which he absorbed like a sponge from every source. That he was moved to try his hand at a quintet would have surprised no one, musical people in his part of the world being fond par­ticularly of the quintets of Luigi Boc­cherini (who wrote about 150 of them to satisfy popular demand). Further, his father's friend, Michael Haydn Ooseph's brother), had just brought out an edition of the first of his own string quintets which, doubtless, added stimulus to the lad's imagination.

The grouping of instruments for a string quintet, two violins, two violas, and a cello, posed fascinating problems of clarity for the composer. As we hear his solutions, it is never less than marvelous the way he weaves separate lines of music for each of the five using the violas as a bridge between the violins' upper register and the single cello's lower one. The young man's skill at balancing these strands of tone so harmoniously is breathtaking, particularly because he had not yet discovered the works of Bach and Handel. In much the same way that as a little child he had played the violin without having had a lesson, this 17-year-old simply intuited the means to produce counterpoint of considerable delicacy. 

By the time he was 35 Mozart's vast experience as a composer (more than 600 works had accumulated) allowed him unprecedented ability in dealing with musical expression. His final Quintet, written eight months before his death, appeared in print two years later with an advertisement which attributed the work's inspiration to "the very lively stimulation of a music lover. " 

Today's belief is that this was a former violinist from the Esterhazy orchestra, Johann Tost, for whom Haydn had written his 12 greatest quartets. The Quintet in E-flat major was composed at a tough time for Mozart. Unhealthy, overworked, and penniless, he poured himself into his work, writing one unsurpassed masterpiece after another. Music flowed from him. Unusually, the Quintet reflects something of the man's state of mind (something Mozart's works almost never did). Like a wound-up spring, the Allegro di molto is throughout taut and tense. Then the Andante takes an artless little dancelike theme heavenward through variation techniques such as only Mozart commanded, while the jaunty Menuetto features a Trio of such delicacy as to take away one's breath. The Finale culminates in a spectacle of contrapuntal finesse, a double fugato based on the two halves of its main theme! Talk about the outer limits of genius.