"Partitions des cinq principaux Quintetti pour deux Violons, deux Altos, et Violoncelle, composés par W. A. Mozart. No. 4" [K. 593]

Offenbach am Main: Chez Jean André. [ca. 1824]. 8vo.  31 pp.  [PN] 4794.  Lithograph score for Mozart's String Quintet No. 5 in D major, K. 593.  A superb copy of the reissue of the 1800 edition.  RISM MM 5982a.  Very fine condition in original blue wrappers.

"Mozart composed his last two quintets in the winter and early spring of 1790–91, at the end of a creatively lean period when his finances and, so far as we can infer from his correspondence, his spirits were often at a low ebb.  When Artaria published K593 and K614 in 1793, their title pages carried the dedication ‘Composto per un Amatore Ongharesa’.  The identity of the ‘Hungarian amateur’ who apparently commissioned the quintets remains unknown, though one possible clue is a later statement by Mozart’s widow that the composer had ‘done some work’ for Johann Tost, the second-violinist-turned-entrepreneur of Haydn’s Esterházy orchestra.

The two late quintets have always been overshadowed by the more overtly ‘expressive’ C major and G minor quintets, with their greater melodic abundance and richness of texture.  Both share with other late Mozart works an almost austere thematic economy.  Sonorities tend to be sparer and more astringent, the tone (except in the Adagio of K593) more nonchalant and abstracted.  The String Quintet in D major K593, of December 1790, is also characteristic of late Mozart (compare the Piano Sonata K576, and the finales of the three ‘Prussian’ quartets, K575, 589 and 590) in its wiry, faintly abrasive contrapuntal textures.  Indeed, in its first and last movements this is one of the most consistently polyphonic of all Mozart’s works. Unique in Mozart, and a probable model for Haydn’s ‘Drum Roll’ Symphony, No 103, is the symbiotic link between the Larghetto introduction and the main Allegro.  Not only does the theme of the latter evolve from the former, but the Larghetto makes a surprise return in the coda, just before the movement ends with a blunt repetition of the Allegro’s opening eight bars—the kind of beginning-as-end pun Haydn enjoyed." (Richard Wigmore, Hyperion Records) (1162)

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