Mozart: String Quartet No. 19, Dissonance | Gewandhaus Quartet

Mozart with dissonances in a Baroque castle: The Gewandhaus Quartet played the String Quartet No. 19 in C major (K. 465), the “Dissonances Quartet” in the stylish ambience of the Rammenau Baroque Castle in 2005. (00:00) I. Adagio - Allegro (10:00) II. Andante cantabile (17:30) III. Menuetto - Allegretto (22:44) IV. Allegro molto To this day, the epithet “Dissonance Quartet” may be off-putting to some, but it may arouse curiosity in others. Some of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s contemporaries (1756 - 1791) thought that the String Quartet No. 19 in C major (K. 465) was faulty: either the notes were set incorrectly or the musicians simply were not playing it properly. Yet Mozart had composed the slow introduction of his 19th string quartet, to which the epithet refers, with the greatest sophistication. Before the main key of the quartet (C major) appears, the strings are “searching” for their actual target key, starting from C minor and wandering through transpositions and tonal frictions.