Mozart’s Piano Quartet K493 is a far more mellow and melodious work with, in the first movement, a similar relaxed grandeur of his recently composed E flat Piano Concerto, K482.
As in the Mozart piano concertos, the first movement has a profusion of lyrical themes, which expand and proliferate at leisure. Most pervasive and influential is the theme that establishes the dominant key, B flat, initiated by the piano and immediately echoed by the violin.
The A flat Larghetto, is in full sonata form, and it has an impassioned development that begins with a dramatic re-interpretation of the opening phrase.
Mozart’s sketches reveal that he discarded two drafts of the Finale’s gavotte-like theme before arriving at a version that satisfied him. Again there is an abundance of melodies, though the movement’s chief theme is an idea that at first seems to be merely transitional: a unison for the three strings answered by a pleading syncopated phrase on the piano. This idea is rarely absent for long, chromatically expanded just before the initial return of the main theme and, in an echo of the first movement, sounded in close canonic imitation in the coda.
Let’s listen now to the Piano Quartet KV 493 by Wolfgang Mozart:
