![]() The development immediately transforms the exposition’s final cadence in a mock-stormy C minor, with explosive scales from the piano and cussed offbeat accents, before a series of tense string dialogues against rippling keyboard figuration. ![]() One difference between the quintet version and the piano quartet arrangement is that whereas the leisurely cantabile themes of the Allegro ma non troppo were originally presented as keyboard solos, now the strings join in discreetly midway through. ![]() Beethoven follows Mozart’s plan of opening with a majestic slow introduction, though, typically, his rhetoric is more emphatic. Beethoven, working on a more expansive scale, sets them in opposition, so that the outer movements at times resemble a chamber concerto for piano. Mozart had subtly interwoven the piano and the wind quartet. While this genial, urbane music owes a debt to Mozart in general and his piano and wind quintet in particular, Beethoven’s voice and methods remain his own. Both versions were published together as Op 16 in 1801. ![]() To maximize sales, Beethoven quickly arranged it, with minimal reworking, as a piano quartet (the keyboard part is unaltered, though the strings sometimes play where the wind were silent). The example of Mozart’s masterly Quintet for piano and wind, K452, clearly lies behind Beethoven’s own Quintet for the same combination (piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn), probably completed during his triumphant visit to Berlin in the summer of 1796 (though it may have been begun as early as 1794) and premiered at a concert at Ignaz Jahn’s restaurant in Vienna on 6 April 1797. But he was confident enough to risk head-on comparison with the recently dead Mozart in works such as the first two piano concertos, the E flat String Trio Op 3 (modelled on Mozart’s Trio K563) and a clutch of chamber works involving wind instruments. During his early years of unalloyed success in Vienna, Beethoven was understandably cautious about tackling the elevated genres of the string quartet and the symphony, in which Haydn, then still at the height of his powers, particularly excelled. ![]()
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