String Quartet No. 20 (Mozart)

Mozart's "Hoffmeister" quartet

The String Quartet No. 20 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. Hoffmeister had started issuing a series of chamber-music publications in 1785, including Mozart's K. 499 as well as Joseph Haydn's String Quartet No. 35, Op. 42.^[1]

Structure

There are four movements:

Allegretto, in D major
Menuetto: Allegretto, in D major, with a trio section in D minor
Adagio, in G major
Allegro, in D major

This work, sandwiched between the six Haydn Quartets (1782–85) and the following three Prussian Quartets (1789–90), 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 in the trio between the violins, and between the viola and cello.

References

^ Grave, Floyd; Grave, Margaret G. (2006). The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn. Oxford University Press. p. 219. ISBN 978-0-19-517357-4.

External links

String Quartet No. 20: Score and critical report (in German) in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe
String Quartet No. 20 in D major: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
Mozart's autograph of the Hoffmeister Quartet, British Library ^{[dead link]}
Christiansen, Kai (26 March 2017). "Program Note: Mozart, String Quartet in D major, K. 499 "Hoffmeister"". Earsense Chamberbase. Retrieved 23 January 2024.
String Quartet in D major, K. 499 (video) on YouTube, Philharmonia Quartet Berlin 2014
Jerusalem Quartet (1996). "Free recording". Jerusalem Music Centre. Archived from the original on 31 August 2006.