Clarinet Quintet in A, K.581
Allegro
Larghetto
Menuetto – Trio I - Trio II
Allegretto con variazioni
Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet is the second of the three great works he wrote for his friend and fellow-freemason, the clarinettist Anton Stadler. Stadler was the principal clarinettist of the court orchestra in Vienna, and seems to have been an artist of remarkable gifts – one Viennese critic wrote of his playing that "I would not have thought that a clarinet could imitate the human voice so deceptively as you imitate it. Your instrument is so soft, so delicate in tone that no-one who has a heart can resist it". Stadler’s playing was clearly an inspiration to Mozart, and the clarinet consequently took a place in his affections second only to the viola. Clarinets give a distinctive, very personal character to such works as the A major piano concerto (K.488) and the Requiem (K.626), and the three masterpieces in which the clarinet is the principal instrument – the concerto (K.622), the "Kegelstatt" Trio (K.498) and this quintet – stand apart from the main body of Mozart’s work by virtue of their expressive intimacy. Of these, the Quintet is outstanding for the sensuous beauty of its tone colours; the exquisite subtlety with which Mozart mixes and contrasts the sounds of his five instruments.
The quintet was a form with which Mozart had a particular affinity; his string quintets (K.515 and K.516) of 1787 are two of his most profound achievements. Tellingly, the fifth instrument in these works was a second viola, so whilst these string quintets gave Mozart unparalleled experience in handling and balancing a five-player ensemble, it’s unsurprising that when he used a clarinet as a fifth instrument he expressed a slightly less inward vein of inspiration. Thus, while never less than pure and intimate chamber music, the Clarinet Quintet has a more "open" character than most of Mozart’s masterpieces for strings alone – but also because, unusually amongst Mozart’s chamber music, it was actually written for performance in front of an audience. Mozart completed it in September 1789 as a contribution to the annual Christmas benefit concert for widows of Viennese musicians, on December 22 that year. Stadler, of course, took the clarinet part; Mozart the viola. Certain features of the Quintet reveal its origin as a "crowd pleaser" meant for a wide audience; the jaunty, comic-opera melody of the finale’s variation-theme, for example, and the yodelling clarinet part in the rustic second Trio of the Minuet. But as with all the material in the Quintet, even these simple ideas are used with the highest artistry. The sonata-form opening Allegro is the most formally complex movement, a comprehensive study in sonorities built on three lyrical, gently curving melodies. The clarinet makes its first entry only in the sixth bar; but, when the opening theme returns at the start of the recapitulation, it has achieved a union with the strings and plays with them from the beginning. In the interim the clarinet, as Tovey puts it, "does not and is not intended to blend with the strings, but nowhere gives a more intense pleasure than where it behaves as an inner part exactly like the others". The strings don mutes to accompany the clarinet’s song in the serene Larghetto, a movement sometimes likened to the aria Porgi amor in Le Nozze di Figaro, but of a beauty and poignancy beyond any words. In classical manner, Mozart relaxes in the second half of the work, but the quality of his inspiration never flags, and shines through in the first Trio of the Minuet, a bittersweet A minor solo for his first violinist Zistler. Likewise, the string of high-spirited, deceptively simple variations that makes up the Quintet’s finale is broken by the intense minor-key melancholy of the third variation, a searching chromatic solo for the viola – Mozart himself. But it is merely an episode; Mozart is mindful of his audience and two further variations, one fast and one reflective, lead to a cheerful Allegro that brings the Quintet to an end.
R.G.Bratby, 2002
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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