Adagio–Allegro
Andante cantabile
Menuetto. Allegro
Allegro molto

In 1785 the Viennese publisher Artaria issued a set of six string quartets by Mozart, the title page of which reads: ‘Six Quartets for two violins, viola and violoncello. Composed and dedicated to Signor Joseph Haydn, Master of Music for the Prince of Esterhazy, by his friend W.A. Mozart.’ This was a most unusual dedication for the time: composers nearly always dedicated works to the aristocrats who supported them financially, not to fellow musicians. The Artaria edition of the six ‘Haydn’ Quartets includes a long dedicatory epistle dated 1 September 1785, and headed ‘To my dear friend Haydn’. The quartets, he writes, are ‘the fruit of a long and laborious study,’ but that Haydn himself had told Mozart of his ‘satisfaction with them during your last visit to this capital. It is this above all which urges me to commend them to you … and to be their father, guide and friend!’

This admiration was mutual: after hearing these quartets, Haydn told Mozart’s father that ‘your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.’ Mozart’s ‘long and laborious study’ included a detailed examination of Haydn’s Six Quartets Op.33, which had been composed in 1781. Though Mozart’s music is very much his own in this magnificent set of quartets, it is interesting to note that the scholar David Wyn Jones has found striking parallels between the two sets of quartets, including the slow movements of Op.33 No.1 and K465.

The ‘Dissonance’ Quartet K465 is so called because of the extraordinary slow introduction to the first movement, described by Maynard Solomon as ‘an alien universe’ in which ‘reality has been defamiliarized, the uncanny has supplanted the commonplace.’ In this introduction, Solomon writes that ‘Mozart has simulated the transition from darkness to light, from the underworld to the surface.’ It is a passage of the most extreme chromaticism, but it reaches, finally, the simplicity of C major with the arrival of the main Allegro. The slow movement has parallels with the slow movement of Haydn’s Quartet Op.33 No.1, but it is also a magnificent movement in its own right. The Mozart biographer Otto Jahn waxed lyrical, calling it ‘one of those wonderful manifestations of genius which are only of the earth insofar as they take effect upon human minds, and which soar aloft into a region of blessedness where suffering and passion are transfigured.’ The Minuet has a darker central section in the minor key while the finale is unclouded apart from the occasional surprising twist of harmony – another subtle tribute to the genius of the work’s dedicatee.

Nigel Simeone 2014