CVCMF 2023 - Mozart / Horn Quintet in E-flat Major, K. 407 - Mvmt 3

III Rondo. Allegro
Recorded in concert / live on August 19, 2023
Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival
Chandler Center for the Arts
Violin: Arturo Delmoni
Violas: Katarzyna Bryla, Michael Roth
Cello: Peter Sanders
Horn: Stewart Rose
cvcmf.org
Audio/Video engineer: Peter Weitzner

Quintet for Horn and Strings, in E-Flat, K. 407. . . Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna)

Mozart wrote the Quintet for Horn and Strings toward the end of 1782. In 1781, he had made a large number of sketches of music for horn and orchestra, but completed only one movement, a rondo finale for a concerto. Perhaps he composed this quintet as a trial-run before he felt ready to complete the concerto. This quintet does not have the usually evenly balanced style of Mozart, but seems more like a solo with accompaniment in which Mozart even left pauses in which a soloist could insert cadenzas.

Mozart wrote four concertos for horn; at least three of them were intended for Ignaz Leutgeb or Leitgeb, Mozart’s friend since youth, who had, like Mozart, left Salzburg for Vienna. Mozart also composed this quintet for Leutgeb, who was an extraordinarily gifted player, the first horn player in the Archbishop of Salzburg’s private band. Leutgeb also ran a tiny cheese shop that he presumably opened with money borrowed from the composer’s father, Leopold. Mozart treated Leutgeb so familiarly that he almost always addressed him in a friendly teasing manner, which some would say bordered on the insulting. In the Rondo of Horn Concerto No. 1, Mozart wrote a joking, running commentary on the music’s difficulty. He inscribed Concerto No. 2 to “Leutgeb, donkey, ox, and fool.” The original manuscript of Concerto No. 4 is in red, blue, green, and black ink, and over an especially difficult passage Mozart wrote, “What do you think of that, Herr Leutgeb?” Despite all Mozart’s crude humor at his friend’s expense, he greatly respected Leutgeb’s musicianship. Of Mozart’s works for horn, this quintet is the most difficult and requires utmost virtuosity.

In the Quintet for Horn and Strings, the string ensemble is unconventional: Mozart uses one violin, two violas, and a cello, instead of the usual quartet, maybe hinting at the composer’s partiality to the viola. An edition published in 1800 complicated matters by suggesting that a second cellist could play the horn part, but that disposition of instruments would have resulted in a thick texture of undifferentiated sonorities. With a cello instead of the horn, the single violin would have had even more difficulty establishing its voice. That early publisher confused things further by not accepting the concerto-like three-movement form that Mozart had given the quintet. In an attempt to make the work conform to the rest of Mozart’s chamber music, the publisher presumptuously added a minuet, an arrangement of one of the two in Mozart’s Wind Serenade in E-Flat, K. 375.

The instrument for which this music was composed was, of course, not the modern horn with valves that our contemporary audiences know, but one referred to as the “natural” horn, little more than a coiled length of brass tubing, flared at one end. By changing the pressure of lips and breath, the horn player selected the desired note from the series of natural overtones produced by the vibrating body of air inside the horn. The horn player could alter some overtones by manipulating the instrument. The limited number of notes available from the natural horn (and trumpet for the same reason) accounts for the characteristic melodic and harmonic outline of fanfares and bugle calls. This 18th century horn was sometimes called the hand horn because the player produced all the notes, other than those of the common fanfare, by skillfully placing a hand in the instrument’s bell.

Much of this charming Quintet is essentially a concerto with a violin, two violas, and cello serving as accompaniment to the solo instrument. The music has a lightness of spirit that may reflect the nature of the Mozart/Leutgeb friendship. Throughout, the horn part is very difficult, but gratifying, for even the most demanding passages are idiomatically written for the instrument of the time.

The final movement, Allegro, is a rondo based on a recurring main theme that is a variant of the second movement’s principal subject, identical to it in melody but not in rhythm. In this movement, especially, Mozart makes extreme technical demands on the horn.