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'On Instrumental Sounds, Roles, Genres and Performances: Mozart's Piano Quartets, K..478 and K. 493'

Almost all of the chapters in this volume originated as papers at an international conference on Mozart’s chamber music with keyboard at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, in 2008. But the editor commissioned my chapter separately in late 2009 based on his view that I would be the appropriate scholar to fill a gap in the volume’s contents as well as on his positive reception of my monograph Mozart’s Viennese Instrumental Music: a Study of Stylistic Re-invention (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007) and my article ‘ “We hardly knew what we should pay attention to first”: Mozart the Performer-Composer at Work on the Viennese Piano Concertos’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 134/2 (2009), pp. 185-242. The chapter takes as its point of departure the concerto – string quartet stylistic continuum affecting almost all discussion of Mozart’s piano quartets, determining how issues that traverse the performance and composition of the works contribute to our understanding of this continuum. Primary sources – the autograph and first edition of K. 478 and the first edition of K. 493 (the autograph is lost) – are for the first time given serious scholarly attention as a stimulus for interpreting the works.

This project has acted as a stimulus for two further projects on earlier and later Mozart repertory: for an invited paper ‘Mozart’s Instrumental Music, 1781-82: New Perspectives on the Performer-Composer in Vienna’ at the inaugural Mozart Colloquium, Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts, 29 April 2012; and for my current monograph-in-progress, Mozart in Vienna, 1781-91: a Musical Biography of a Performer-Composer.