Vicka Karlan
MHST Project#1
March 14, 2016
Minor-key quartets of Mozart and Beethoven
Mozart’s K 421 quartet and Beethoven’s op. 18 no. 4 quartet were the only minor key piece found in their 6 sets of quartet. Beethoven was certainly aware of Mozart’s works when writing his music. Beethoven admired Mozart and he used similar style as Mozart’s work (which was originally formed by Haydn} and took that style into a deeper content with extravagant imagination that resulted in many extraordinary works that were hard to be followed by other composers. There were some similarities found in the Mozart’s K 421 and Beethoven’s op. 18 no.4. However, both composers have their own different approaches on how to continue and explore the piece that may …show more content…
Mozart’s K. 421 was to be played in Allegro and Beethoven’s op.18 no. 4 was to be played in Allegro ma non tanto. Beethoven’s Allegro ma non tanto, which meant fast but not too much was still faster, more energetic than Mozart’s allegro. Despite both sharing a dark piece, Mozart’s K.421 was more into gloomy character, serious, reserved and flowing melody with big leaps in the melody line and it has short phrase, while Beethoven’s op.18 no.4 was more daring and straight to the point, a direct shortness of address, a certain impatience, and a clear simplicity of texture. It has longer phrase and it builds up the melody from the low register to the upper register instead of leaping. The similarities between the two pieces were that they shared the same time signature, which is in 4/4, but Mozart used more variant rhythm such as triplets, dotted notes, sixteenth notes in his K. 421 while Beethoven mostly used eight notes and quarter notes. I feel that the rhythm in Mozart’s quartet was more interesting and less stiff. Beethoven and Mozart made use of ornaments from the beginning and throughout the piece. They gave us out a direct key without wandering around and the first theme of both …show more content…
Mozart borrowed the thematic material in the exposition and explored more in the development section. It was tonally unstable in beginning of the development section with continuous harmonic and melodic motion. Mozart extended the descending bass line with same notes on first violin, which is Eb to go out his way and experience possibilities. Mozart showed how much he learned from Haydn and Bach in the development section, which featured a good deal of contrapuntal passagework that started in measure 54-69 where all parts started interacting to each other and he decided to make a sequence out of it for smooth modulation back to its original key D minor in the recapitulation. He used this method to make all 4 parts equally important. Throughout the modulation, we could hear the shadow of the material in the exposition because even though the melody was not the same, he still used the same rhythm, for example in the rhythm of the coda in the exposition, he used the same rhythm when doing the sequence and kept using the same rhythm until he got back to the recapitulation section. That was why the development section seemed familiar in our ears despite different syntax.
The recapitulation and coda in the Mozart’s quartet also proceeded as expected, though the strong emotions and masterful imagination of
MHST Project#1
March 14, 2016
Minor-key quartets of Mozart and Beethoven
Mozart’s K 421 quartet and Beethoven’s op. 18 no. 4 quartet were the only minor key piece found in their 6 sets of quartet. Beethoven was certainly aware of Mozart’s works when writing his music. Beethoven admired Mozart and he used similar style as Mozart’s work (which was originally formed by Haydn} and took that style into a deeper content with extravagant imagination that resulted in many extraordinary works that were hard to be followed by other composers. There were some similarities found in the Mozart’s K 421 and Beethoven’s op. 18 no.4. However, both composers have their own different approaches on how to continue and explore the piece that may …show more content…
Mozart’s K. 421 was to be played in Allegro and Beethoven’s op.18 no. 4 was to be played in Allegro ma non tanto. Beethoven’s Allegro ma non tanto, which meant fast but not too much was still faster, more energetic than Mozart’s allegro. Despite both sharing a dark piece, Mozart’s K.421 was more into gloomy character, serious, reserved and flowing melody with big leaps in the melody line and it has short phrase, while Beethoven’s op.18 no.4 was more daring and straight to the point, a direct shortness of address, a certain impatience, and a clear simplicity of texture. It has longer phrase and it builds up the melody from the low register to the upper register instead of leaping. The similarities between the two pieces were that they shared the same time signature, which is in 4/4, but Mozart used more variant rhythm such as triplets, dotted notes, sixteenth notes in his K. 421 while Beethoven mostly used eight notes and quarter notes. I feel that the rhythm in Mozart’s quartet was more interesting and less stiff. Beethoven and Mozart made use of ornaments from the beginning and throughout the piece. They gave us out a direct key without wandering around and the first theme of both …show more content…
Mozart borrowed the thematic material in the exposition and explored more in the development section. It was tonally unstable in beginning of the development section with continuous harmonic and melodic motion. Mozart extended the descending bass line with same notes on first violin, which is Eb to go out his way and experience possibilities. Mozart showed how much he learned from Haydn and Bach in the development section, which featured a good deal of contrapuntal passagework that started in measure 54-69 where all parts started interacting to each other and he decided to make a sequence out of it for smooth modulation back to its original key D minor in the recapitulation. He used this method to make all 4 parts equally important. Throughout the modulation, we could hear the shadow of the material in the exposition because even though the melody was not the same, he still used the same rhythm, for example in the rhythm of the coda in the exposition, he used the same rhythm when doing the sequence and kept using the same rhythm until he got back to the recapitulation section. That was why the development section seemed familiar in our ears despite different syntax.
The recapitulation and coda in the Mozart’s quartet also proceeded as expected, though the strong emotions and masterful imagination of