Mozart’s first quartet for piano and strings, in G minor, K. 478, apparently the first work ever written for this combination, was to have been followed by two more compositions with the same scoring. However, when the publisher Hoffmeister complained that the public found the first quartet too difficult and wouldn’t buy it, Mozart released him from his contract. Even so, he went on to write a second piano quartet, in E flat, in 1786, some weeks after he completed Le nozze di Figaro. As badly as Mozart needed to be a commercial success at this difficult period of his life, when his Viennese celebrity was already beginning to fade, he still did not take to heart Hoffmeister’s complaint about the G-minor quartet’s technical demands, particularly those in the piano part.

The present work’s keyboard scoring does not make any concessions, either: The piano is extremely active throughout, and the last movement has some distinctly concerto-like passages. This is not to say that the E-flat quartet is any less chamber-like than the G-minor. There is a splendid balance between the keyboard and the strings, and since Mozart had already expertly combined piano with a full complement of instruments in the approximately 20 piano concertos he had composed by this time, he was not confounded by wedding piano and string trio.

As they do in the first quartet, the four players begin together, but rather than open with the main theme, they begin with a succession of ideas whose purpose seems to be to lead to a brief, two-measure thought in B-flat, given first in the piano’s treble, without accompaniment, and then imitated by the violin. Later this motif is singled out for a series of dramatic minor-key excursions in the development section. And it is this same motif that returns in the brief coda before the final cadential chords.

The main theme of the Larghetto second movement (containing a figure not unlike the prominent motif in the first movement) initiates music of the Romanza type that Mozart was so fond of. The lyricism here is equitably shared by strings and keyboard, with the latter sometimes cast as accompaniment. In the last movement the piano is the dominant force. The strings are not exactly neglected, but the keyboard is clearly the star of this multi-theme rondo that unfolds in such masterly fashion that one can only bask in the glow of Mozart’s genius. —Orrin Howard