String Quartet No. 20 (Mozart)

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The first nine bars of the Allegretto opening of the quartet

The String Quartet in D Major, K. 499, was written in 1786 in Vienna by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It was published by — if not indeed written for — his friend Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Because of this, the quartet has acquired the nickname Hoffmeister.

There are four movements:

I. Allegretto, in D major
II. Menuetto: Allegretto, in D major, with a trio section in D minor
III. Adagio, in G major
IV. Allegro, in D major

This work, sandwiched between the six quartets he dedicated to Joseph Haydn (1782–5) and the following three Prussian quartets (1789–90), intended to be dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia (the first edition bore no dedication, however), is often polyphonic in a way uncharacteristic of the earlier part of the classical music era. The menuetto and its trio give good examples of this in brief, with the brief irregular near-canon between first violin and viola in the second half of the main portion of the minuet, and the double imitations (between the violins, and between the viola and cello) going on in the trio.

[edit] References

Einstein, Alfred. Mozart, His Character, His Work. London: Oxford University Press. First Edition: 1945. Translated from the German by Arthur Mendel and Nathan Broder.