String Quartet No. 19 (Mozart)

• 1. Introduction

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  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed K. 465 on the 14th of January 1785. The work became one of the most scrutinized pieces of chamber music he ever wrote. It earned a nickname: the "Dissonance." That name comes from the slow introduction. The passage landed so far outside the harmonic conventions of Mozart's era. Trained musicians disputed it, corrected it, and denounced it well into the next century. What made Mozart write something so resistant to the standards of his time? And what is that introduction actually doing?

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• 2. Six for Haydn

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  On the 12th of February 1785, Mozart and his father gathered with two other musicians to perform three of the quartets for Joseph Haydn. Anton and Bartholomäus Tinti most likely played the remaining parts. K. 465 was the final work in a set of six quartets Mozart had composed between 1782 and 1785, all dedicated to Haydn.

  In his dedication, Mozart called the quartets his "children" being sent "out into the great world." No patron had ordered any of them, and Mozart undertook all six entirely on his own initiative. He described them as "the fruit of a long and laborious endeavour," words that hint at how unusual the effort was for him.

  His normal practice was to sketch the Hauptstimmen, the main voices, and fill in the other parts afterward. For these six quartets, he composed all four voices at the same time. His goal was to fuse Haydn's approach to quartet writing with the contrapuntal methods of Bach.

  Artaria and Company announced the publication of all six quartets on the 17th of September 1785 in the Wiener Zeitung. According to Leopold Mozart, the firm paid the composer 100 ducats for the publishing rights. When the quartet begins, the very first sound is the cello's quiet eighth-note Cs. That detail turns out to be less innocent than it sounds.

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• 3. A Knot of Sound

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  The viola joins on A, and the second violin adds an E. When the first violin enters on A, the collision produces the central dissonance that gives the quartet its nickname. The tension between A and A runs as a structural thread through the entire work. While that tension accumulates, Mozart avoids the third scale degree entirely. Without it, the listener cannot determine whether the key is major or minor. Quartal melodies build toward whole-tone sonorities. The E natural appears only as a neighboring tone until the first violin plays it on the downbeat of measure 14. The very next beat, that violin steps down to an E flat. The entire slow introduction serves one harmonic purpose: to prepare the dominant chord. Mozart underlines that chord with a fermata at the final measure.

  When the Allegro begins, the cello falls silent. The viola takes up the eighth-note Cs, now an octave higher and with considerably more energy. The Allegro's main theme builds from a two-bar motive beginning on tonic C. Mozart sequences the motive up to D in the next two bars. Where a listener expects the sequence to continue to E, he leaps instead to G. He holds back the expected E until bar 167, well into the recapitulation. The coda packs 21 consecutive dissonances into just 3 measures, a final compression of the material Mozart has been building since the Adagio. That same A natural carries into the second movement, where it takes on an entirely different structural role.

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• 4. Heart of the Quartet

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  Alfred Einstein singled out the second movement's coda. The first violin, he wrote, "openly expresses what seemed hidden beneath the conversational play of the subordinate theme." The movement, a sonatina in F major, has been called the "heart" of the quartet. In that key, the A natural settles into a comfortable position as the mediant scale degree. Between bars 93 and 101, Mozart slips into the parallel minor, and the A comes forward again with renewed tension.

  In the third movement, a minuet and trio in C major, Mozart sustains the A and A interplay. He frequently ornaments the A with an appoggiatura G. The trio shifts to C minor, returning A to contested territory. The cello carries the trio's concluding melody, tracing the vacillations between those two notes. Unison passages appear throughout the movement, usually signaling a change in texture ahead.

  The fourth movement's exposition runs 136 bars, the development 62 bars, and Mozart adds a 48-bar coda. Mozart draws on Haydn's witty deployment of rests to create rhythmic variety and contrast against the melodic material. The development passes through a circle of fifths in minor keys, matching the harmonic audacity of the slow introduction. That modulation resolves onto the main theme, and within two years of publication, critics who had heard the entire work reached for ink.

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• 5. Critics and Corrections

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  The first negative published comment on K. 465 appeared in the Magazin der Musik on the 23rd of April 1787. The correspondent had written from Vienna on the 29th of January. He reported on Haydn's recent visit to the city and on Mozart's plans to travel to Prague and Berlin. He called the quartets "too highly seasoned" and asked whose palate could "endure this for long." Two years later, the same periodical, now published in Copenhagen, reversed course. A new correspondent praised Mozart's "great and elevated ideas" and "a bold spirit." By 1799, an anecdote from Constanze Mozart was circulating in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. An Italian printer had returned the engraving plates to Artaria, convinced the notes were errors.

  The most sustained attack came from Giuseppe Sarti, a composer who had met Mozart in Vienna in 1784. Mozart had considered him a "good honest fellow" and written a set of variations, K. 460, on one of Sarti's arias. Sarti returned that generosity by calling the opening violin dissonance "execrable" and accusing Mozart of having "ears lined with iron." His analysis broadened into a verdict: Mozart was "nothing more than a piano-forte player with spoiled ears." Bonifazio Asioli considered the essay so gratuitous that he suppressed it entirely. It was not published until Asioli's death in 1832, when it appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.

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• 6. The Long Argument

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  François-Joseph Fétis brought the argument into musicological print in the Revue musicale on the 17th of July 1830. He was so certain the dissonances were engraving errors that he traveled to London to examine Mozart's manuscript. He found it in the possession of J. A. Stumpff. His first proposed fix was to delay the first violin's entrance by one beat. Unsatisfied, he tried again, prolonging the second violin's D into the third bar. Both solutions rewrote Mozart to conform to harmonic rules Fétis had formulated in his own theoretical work.

  Gottfried Weber, François-Louis Perne, and Raphael-Georg Kiesewetter each attempted an analysis or a revision. Ernest Newman devoted a full chapter to the quartet in A Musical Critic's Holiday. The disputes over K. 465 drew comparisons to the decades of argument about Richard Wagner's prelude to Tristan und Isolde. The irony of that comparison is structural: Mozart's introduction is a direct functional predecessor to the Tristan chord. Heinrich Schenker's analysis, completed by 1906, confirmed that the passage was not deficient. It was simply correct, and it took the rest of harmonic music more than a century to find the same place.

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