Waldstein Ensemble - Gerhard Schulz violin, Guy Ben-Ziony viola, Lilia Bayrova-Schulz cello, Noam Greenberg piano

Mozart: Piano Quartet in G minor KV 478
Faure:  Piano Quartet in G minor Op.45

Programme Notes

Piano Quartet in G minor, K478
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

1. Allegro  2. Andante  3. Rondo (allegro)

According to Constanze Mozart’s second husband, Georg Nikolaus Nissen, whose unfinished biography of the composer was published after his death, Mozart was commissioned to write three piano quartets by the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister. The G minor Quartet, K478, was completed in 1785 but it was found too difficult, for both audiences and musicians, and Hoffmeister allowed Mozart to keep the advance on his fee on condition that he did not write the other two. The Piano Quartet in E flat that Mozart wrote the following year was accepted by another publisher.

The story may or may not be true but there is no doubt that with the G minor Quartet Mozart created something unprecedented in the field of chamber music with keyboard instrument. Previously this had been regarded as primarily a medium for domestic, amateur music-making, with the keyboard part having the main musical interest and any other instruments providing an accompaniment. But at the end of the 1770s Mozart produced a number of sonatas for keyboard and violin (convention purposely listed the instruments that way round) in which he began tilting the balance towards a more equal partnership between the two instruments; this development continues in the G minor Quartet.

Hoffmeister’s string-playing customers, used to a simple accompanying role, were no doubt unprepared for parts as taxing as these. They would also have been startled by the music’s emotional demands. Right from the start it is clear that the first movement of K478 is going to be a stormy, passionate affair. The stern unison opening figure dominates the entire movement. Even when not stated in full it can be sensed in the background, with just the first two notes being enough of a reminder. So when it comes back with redoubled force to signal the return of the opening music, it is with a feeling not so much of surprise as of an expected culmination. The coda ends the movement in a mood of vehement defiance.

The B flat andante is the perfect answer to the turbulence of first movement. The serenity of its many gently falling phrases seems to have a profoundly healing quality, which enables Mozart to move convincingly to the lively G major finale. Even here, there are subtly poignant touches in small melodic details which keep superficial jollity at bay, and particularly in a central passage when the music is clouded by minor keys and a stormy moment that recalls the spirit (if not the actual material) of the first movement. A sequence of trills on the piano heralds the last return of the rondo theme, after which the music lurches dramatically into E flat before gliding, with unruffled poise, back to the key it should be in, ready for the final bars.

Piano Quartet no 2 in G minor, Op 45
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)                                                                                                     

1. Allegro molto moderato  2. Allegro molto  3. Adagio non troppo  4. Allegro molto.

Fauré was one of the first French composers to benefit from an upsurge of interest in chamber music stimulated by the creation in Paris of the Société Nationale de Musique founded partly by his teacher, Saint-Saëns, in 1871. Beginning with his first violin sonata of 1875-6 and ending with the string quartet written shortly before he died, he made one of the most distinguished contributions to the chamber music repertory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

He also had valuable encouragement from Winnaretta Singer after she had heard his first piano quartet. The heiress of the well-known American sewing-machine manufacturer, she was to become, particularly after her marriage to Prince Edmond de Polignac, an important patron of new music in Paris.

We don’t know exactly when Fauré began his second piano quartet, but it seems to have been sometime in 1885. He finished it the following year, and was the pianist at the first performance in January 1887.

The opening, with its arching melody for the three strings in unison, immediately reveals the undercurrent of controlled emotional turbulence which runs through the whole work. Gentler themes, for viola, for violin and for viola and cello, provide an expressive contrast. It is followed by a tense, rhythmically charged second movement which derives much of its propulsive energy from the syncopated piano theme heard shortly after the start.

 Fauré rarely described his sources of inspiration, but in the case of the third movement he linked the music to a childhood memory:

 …without really meaning to, I recalled a peal of bells we used to hear of an evening, drifting over to Montgauzy from a village called Cadirac whenever the wind blew from the west. Their sound gives rise to a vague reverie which, like all vague reveries, is not translatable into words.

In an article on Fauré published in 1924 Aaron Copland summed this movement up perfectly: “its beauty is a truly classic one if we define classicism as intensity on a background of calm.”

The finale brings the music’s tensions to a head and eventually resolves them in an exultant concluding paragraph of steadily mounting excitement.

 © Mike Wheeler, 2010