Stamitz: Orchestral Quartets - Vienna Chamber Orchestra

"Stamitz climbed gradually -- following a dramatic plan not drawn up by every Kapellmeister -- from the ears into the heart, as though from Allegros into Adagios; this great composer sweeps in narrower and narrower circles about the breast that holds a heart until he finally reaches it and in ecstasy embraces it. . . With silent tears whose flowing no one saw, Horion abandoned his battered heart to the lofty Adagios, which spread themselves with warm eider-down wings over all his wounds." With these words, the novelist Jean Paul described a "Garden Concert by Stamitz," which he attended in August, 1792, although the quotation is from a chapter of his novel "Hesperus," which he was writing at the time.

Another, pithier, and somewhat less flattering picture of Karl Stamitz, and his younger brother Anton, was written by Mozart to his father on July 9, 1778: "Of the two Stamitz brothers, only the younger one is here, the elder (the real composer à la Hafeneder*) is in London. They indeed are two wretched scribblers, gamblers, swillers and adulterers -- not the kind of people for me."