Musical prodigies … are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.” “And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?” said Zelter. “Yes”, answered Goethe, “… but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.
Todd, (2003) Mendelssohn, A Life in Music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat major, K.493 (1786)
Felix Mendelssohn String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 87 (1845)
Antonin Dvořák Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, Op. 81 (1887)
BCMS Season 41 opens with our return to Sanders Theater on Sunday, October 1 at 3pm, the first of six of our eight concerts. (Two concerts, on January 21 and April 21, will be held at Jordan Hall.) In our first we welcome violinist Alyssa Wang as our newest Member Musician, and bid grateful thanks to violist Dimitri Murrath, who recently joined the award-winning Esmé String Quartet. We welcome violinist David Bowlin for the first of three appearances this season and delight in hearing and seeing our regular members, pianist Max Levinson and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan.
Our program returns with our common paring of masterworks by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Felix Mendelssohn, who each first came to the attention of German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as child geniuses. Despite Goethe’s opinion, the presence of three piano quartets among Mendelssohn’s early work (in apparent reference to Mozart’s two mold-breaking works), and two viola quintets (in response to Mozart’s six) show Mendelssohn’s keen awareness throughout life of an inevitable comparison to the earlier master.
Our program makes a similar reference to its earlier efforts and works for formats that resulted from the act of accumulation, i.e., adding an instrument to a standard format to create another. A piano trio with added viola becomes a piano quartet. A string quartet with extra viola becomes a viola quintet. A string quartet with added piano results in a piano quintet. In addition, each of these works is the second effort in its format by the composer who may have sought to exceed the technical and dramatic norms of earlier efforts.
In the case of the Mozart, his contract for three piano quartets was cancelled after the first was published because he was said to have exceeded the level of virtuosity expected of home consumers. (He wrote the second anyway!) Mendelssohn’s use of a forte tremolando accompaniment to his quintet’s opening theme is clearly more orchestral than intimate, crossing again that boundary he had explored in his early Octet for strings. And, Dvořák, writing in the wake of masterworks by Schumann and Brahms, was not shy about ethnic inclusion–adding his native Bohemian folk elements, such as the Dumka, with which he flavored his works.
Enjoy,
MT
