This single volume contains all the string quartets of the little-known early quartets in an Italianate manner composed between 1770 and 1773: the six quartets dedicated to Franz Josef Haydn (1782–85); the D Major Quartet (K.499) composed in 1786; and the last three quartets (1789-90) written for the King of Prussia. In addition to the 23 string quartets, the volume contains an alternate slow movement to the G Major Quartet, K. 156. The music is photographically reprinted from the Breitkopf & Härtel printed score, still considered the standard, authoritative edition for the Mozart quartets. Noteheads in this edition have been reproduced in a size large enough to be read easily from a music stand or the keyboard, and margins and spaces between staves are conveniently wide to permit written notes, harmonic analysis, fingerings, and running measure numbers. This edition is practical for study, reference, enjoyment—virtually any use.
Author
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over six hundred works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers. Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty; at seventeen he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. Visiting Vienna in 1781 he was dismissed from his Salzburg position and chose to stay in the capital, where over the rest of life he achieved fame but little financial security. The final years in Vienna yielded many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and the Requiem. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons. Mozart always learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate—the whole informed by a vision of humanity "redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute". His influence on all subsequent Western art music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years".
