Mozart: The Flute Quartets

Description

In 1777-78, travelling through Mannheim and Paris on the awkward path from Salzburg to independence, Mozart accepted Ferdinand Dejean’s commission and discovered how naturally the flute could sing. These quartets for flute and string trio are conversations in fine clothes, poised between salon grace and theatre, a music of rooms rather than halls, yet with the sparkle of a miniature stage. The city of Mannheim famed for its disciplined orchestra, its long crescendi and expressive winds – offered a laboratory for colour and balance; Paris suggested fashionable juxtapositions and a taste for airs variés; Munich brought the poise of opera; Vienna added the sociable intelligence of the salon. Out of these rooms, Mozart fashioned works in which the flute is not an exotic bird perched above the texture but a citizen among equals.
The Mannheim pieces set the tone. The Quartet in D major KV 285 feels almost like a concerto in miniature: an opening Allegro that gives the flute a radiant line over buoyant string figuration, confident yet collegial, the strings answering with quicksilver scales and arpeggios so that display never becomes domination. The Adagio moves to B minor and breathes nocturne air. With the strings pizzicato – a soft pad on which the melody rests – the flute sings an aria that seems both private and eloquent, a confiding voice that hovers between melancholy and consolation. One senses how the young composer, intoxicated by Mannheim players and by the opera in his veins, could make an instrumental line feel vocal without words. The Rondeau returns to daylight, elegant and capricious, each episode offering a new facet of the conversation. The D major quartet is youthful but never juvenile; its virtuosity is civilised by tact, much as in Haydn’s quartets the brightest wit is anchored by courtesy.
If KV 285 blazes, the Quartet in G major KV 285a glows. With only two movements and an opening Andante, it begins not with bravura but with poise. The flute and violin trade phrases that recall the ease of Johann Christian Bach – whose chamber textures Mozart cherished and from whom he learned so much about balance and line. The music listens as much as it speaks; viola and cello murmur with a discreet, Haydnesque humour, and nothing is forced. A graceful Tempo di menuetto bows to courtly tradition without stiffness, its trio coloured by a gentle shift of weight in the inner voices. This is Enlightenment conversation: measured, companionable, designed as much for the pleasure of exchange as for the display of ideas. In such writing one hears the seed of the equality that would govern later quartets – the belief that eloquence in chamber music is collective.
The Quartet in C major KV Anh 171 (285b) is marked by history yet irresistible in effect. Likely left incomplete and later rounded out, it nevertheless unfolds with persuasive naturalness. The opening Allegro is all bright play, a pageant of scales and syncopations that keeps the texture transparent. The second movement, Thema and variations, becomes a parlour of personae: first the flute draws filigree, then the violin embroiders, and the lower strings claim eloquent paragraphs of their own. One variation turns to the minor as though thoughts had slipped indoors from the garden; another restores a smiling grace. The close adds a gently comic tilt, a wink that sits somewhere between minuet and country dance. Mozart’s mezzo carattere – that fusion of the serious and the playful – is everywhere. Listeners will hear kinships across his oeuvre: the elegant, breathing lines anticipate the wind serenades, and the very idea of a variation-theatre finds a grand echo in the Gran Partita KV 361, where public splendour still allows for private confession.
While in Mannheim and Paris he also explored fashionable combinations, sketching the Concerto for Flute and Harp KV 299/297c and discovering that fashion could serve substance. After the Paris reverses and a reluctant return to Salzburg, he stepped into Munich with Idomeneo and with the Quartet in F major KV 370. The F-major work is chamber music that behaves like a miniature concerto. The opening Allegro sets a noble gait, yet within it the solo line must vault and dance, testing the instrument’s newly extended compass. The development is peppered with friendly skirmishes between soloist and violin, the harmony alive with Mannheim polish. The Adagio turns to D minor and becomes an operatic scena without words: the strings speak in half-shadows, the flute answers with tender ornament, and the pauses feel like breaths taken between phrases on the stage. The finale, a Rondeau in F major, carries a teasing rhythmic jeu d’esprit – duple gestures set against a lilting 6/8 – before all resolves with a smile. Brilliance and warmth travel together here, just as in Idomeneo grandeur and intimacy learn to share the same air.
At the other end of the journey stands the Quartet in A major K 298, written some years later probably for friends and for fun. Mozart labels it, with a wink, a quatuor dialogué. Its first movement, Thema and variations, borrows a suave song by his friend and publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister, presented plainly and then dressed in ever more playful disguises. One need not recognise the original to enjoy the wit, because the counterpoint is crystal and the camaraderie effortless: the flute ornaments, yields, and returns; the strings imitate, tease and applaud. The Menuetto moves with chaste grace, but in the trio the flute slips in a cheeky French tune – Il a des bottes, des bottes, Bastien – as though we had wandered for a moment into a Parisian parlour before composing ourselves again. The Rondeau crowns the jest. Its mock-Italianate instruction – Allegretto grazioso, ma non troppo presto, però non troppo adagio. Così-così – con molto garbo ed espressione – is a tempo marking that is also a smile, and the main theme nods to Paisiello’s Chi mi mostra tant’amor. Homage turns to mischief as Mozart toys with timing and accent, a pageant of giocoso invention that never breaks the spell of elegance. It is the last of the flute quartets and the most companionable – a benediction rather than a farewell.
Threaded through these quartets are lines that reach outward. Mannheim sheen points to Haydn’s evolving quartet world, where conversational equality is law; Mozart adapts that principle for a group with a nominal soloist, ensuring the flute never silences its partners. The aria-like slow movements anticipate not only Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni but also the instrumental singing of the Sinfonia concertante and the wind serenades, with their gift for public grace and private candour. The deft finales, whether rondo or variation, echo the civilised wit of J. C. Bach and look forward to the urbanity of the Viennese piano variations; the playful borrowings in KV 298 align with a European habit of quotation that stretches from Parisian quatuors d’airs to the salon fantasies of later generations. These quartets carry the aura of rooms: rooms in Mannheim palaces, Munich apartments, Viennese houses where music and conversation shared the same table. The flute here is not a pastoral cliché but a citizen of the ensemble, capable of singing with natural ease and listening with tact. The strings, freed from mere accompaniment, provide commentary of their own – the velvet murmur of the viola, the warm anchoring of the cello, the quick assent and occasional dissent of the violin. Mozart draws eloquence from economy: repeated-note cushions that breathe; canonic glances that never hector; cadences that hold their breath a heartbeat longer than courtesy requires. In the D-major Adagio, pizzicato makes a frame of air, inviting the flute to paint grief without rhetoric. In the G-major Andante, turns of phrase open like shutters to half-light. In the C-major variations, character studies unfold with a miniature theatre finesse. In the F-major slow movement, opera crosses the threshold quietly, and in the A-major finale, wit dances on tiptoe, never raising its voice. Gathered together, the five works invite a listening that moves not simply from piece to piece but from light to shade and back again. The itinerary ends where it should, in a smile. Yet along the way we have travelled a fair distance – from a Mannheim winter to a Viennese evening, from apprenticeships absorbed to friendships saluted, from the world fashion to the heart measure. Heard now, these quartets still sound like the art of conversation at its best: swift, candid, elegant, and humane. They remind us that even when the subject appears slight, Mozart finds depth; and when the surface is brilliant, he never forgets the warmth beneath.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2025