String Quartet No. 14 in G major, K. 387
String Quartet No. 17 in B-flat major, K. 458
String Quartet No. 18 in A major, K. 464

With this release, the Engegard Quartet completes its recordings of the six string quartets that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dedicated to his paternal friend Joseph Haydn. Written in Vienna in Mozart’s “mature” years from age 25 until he died 36 years old in 1791 they are a gift to a friend that hardly has its equal. He worked on them alongside many other works from 1782 to 1785 and proudly presented them to friends and colleagues, often in his own home. His own son believed he would have become immortal had he written nothing else.

Mozart was himself a remarkable violinist and violist. His father Leopold made him aware that being as brilliant a violinist as pianist was simply a matter of the will. There are solo passages in his divertimenti requiring exceptional virtuosity on the part of the concertmaster, passages he very likely performed himself. He played the quartets with some of Vienna’s best musicians. Joseph Haydn, himself an able violinist, was among them. We are left to wonder what it sounded like.

The level of sound was weaker than that of the Engegard Quartet. The instruments had sensitive gut strings, and the rather straight bow had fewer horsehairs than today. In addition, with probably less string tension, the instruments had a gentler feel, and playing technique was somewhat different. There is evidence for this in Leopold Mozart’s own violin method from 1756, the year Wolfgang was born. Thus we would expect the sound to differ from what we hear today, and efforts to recreate it can help us in our conceptions. As a matter of fact, Mozart’s own viola can be viewed in Salzburg in the house on Getreidegasse in which he was born.

It is more difficult to imagine the playing of the music. The notation of Mozart’s “Haydn quartets” is very precise and remarkably detailed; does this mean that one never strayed from the text? The earliest musician for whom we have recordings pianist Carl Reinecke, born in 1824 treats Mozart’s text very freely, and Mozart himself was known for his brilliant spontaneity. The ideal of our time of synchronous interplay between musicians cannot be taken for granted either; did one play one’s part more independently back then? There are, to be sure, recordings with mechanical instruments from Mozart’s time, but these questions must remain unanswered nonetheless. Little has been preserved that can provide us with a reliable picture of him and how he appeared. There is an abundance of music but what it really sounded like, we don’t know.

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Recorded in Sofienberg Church, Oslo, 18–19 and 21–22 May 2020. Instruments: Giovanni Battista Rogeri violin (Brescia, 1690); Jean Baptiste Vuillaume violin (1858); Giacomo Zanoli cello (1737); Giuseppe Guadagnini viola (1770).