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While on a concert tour of Italy during late 1772 and early 1773, Mozart composed a series of six string quartets, K. 155-160; K. 158 opens tonight's concert. Later, concertizing in Vienna he heard Haydn's latest quartets, Op. 17 and Op. 20; his admiration for these quartets can be heard in his next quartet cycle, K.168-173, from which we hear K. 168 this evening. These two early quartets, infrequently heard, celebrate Mozart's 250th birthday and also frame the work of another famous Austrian composer, Anton Webern

Daniel Avshalomov, violist of the American String Quartet, observes that K. 159 may be "heard as two duos much of the time," the instruments joining for the simplest of scales at the ends of key sections. The quartet opens with an Andante, a departure from the customary sonata form allegro. In The String Quartet: A History, Paul Griffiths admires the polished loveliness of the Andante theme, first stated in the second violin. The first and second violins dialogue with the viola and cello to introduce a contrasting second section, after which a restatement of the first theme concludes the movement.

The structural clarity (exposition, development, recapitulation) of the second movement, an Allegro in G minor, dispels what Avshamolov describes as the "fuzzy and questioning" nature of the opening Andante. He imaginatively describes the third movement rondo as "a sampler of cheerful rhythms and textures as its music-box theme twists from peekaboo to youthful flirtation."

Webern has been called "the mad scientist of music" for his revolutionary compositional techniques (Rodda). Although he completed traditional doctoral studies in musicology and the compositional practices of the Renaissance at Vienna University, Webern's subsequent studies with Anton Schoenberg changed his life and his music.

Webern applied Schoenberg's concept of the twelve-tone nonhierarchical chromatic scale to all the elements of music: harmony, rhythm, dynamics, duration, and tonal structures. He compressed his compositions into brief episodes, and in Opus 5 dramatically altered the string quartet. Lucy Miller explains: "It is as though the genre of the string quartet had imploded to its very minimum, as though form and structure had been so condensed that only the essences remained."

Finding a title for Opus 5, composed in 1909, presented a problem for Webern. According to Griffiths he rejected "string quartet" because the sections are not linked sufficiently to justify that designation. They are, however, more united that the second title he rejected: "five pieces." Webern finally settled on "five movements." Berger notes that although the movements lack the conventional devices used to express emotion in music, Webern told composer Alban Berg that the music was related to the death of his mother in 1906, an event that profoundly influenced the rest of his life.

The first movement outlines a "sonata allegro in the process of fracture and disintegration" (Griffiths). The exposition lasts only thirteen bars, its first subject consisting of two notes, "the jarring interval of a rising minor ninth" played by the second violin and cello. The episode concludes with three sharp strokes played with the wood of the bows. The cello states the second subject, answered by the violins. All four instruments playing rapid pizzicato notes introduce the compact development. The recapitulation begins with music reminiscent of the second subject; an inversion of the opening interval of the ninth completes the movement. As Griffiths explains, "nothing is ever really resolved in this keyless universe" where the "music is less concerned with consistency that with sudden shifts of texture, dynamic, pitch range and sonority."

Only thirteen measures long, the second movement is an "adagio, but on a scale where it becomes meaningless to speak of form." Creating an arch, a "melodic thread passes up from viola to second violin, to first and then back down to second violin, accompanied by faint chords and little ostinatos, always soft, ... experienced in a single breath." The third movement follows, a thirty-five second scherzo, "bitten off almost before it has begun" (Griffiths).

The fourth movement, another quiet adagio, opens with two "cryptic measures" followed by a descending four-note theme in the first violin, which is immediately echoed in the second violin and cello. This fleeting movement ends as the second violin's music disappears at the end of an ascending figure. A few notes of a wide-ranging melody played in the cello introduce the final slow movement in which the other instruments play whispered chords and melodic fragments. Bits and pieces of this material and remembrances of previous movements continue until, as Griffiths describes it, "what had begun as a string quartet evaporates into a sequence of tremulously expressive fragments."

The sparkling clarity of Mozart's K.168 stands in sharp contrast to the complicated intensities of Webern's Opus 5. In the Allegro, the first violin states the simple light-hearted first theme, a descending melody that outlines the tonic chord and closes with a bold descending two-octave scale. After a short transition the second violin restates the first theme. A buzzing dotted rhythm in the violins introduces the slower second theme, an alternating accented and unaccented melody, in the viola and cello. A closing theme of rapid staccato sixteenth notes concludes the exposition. A short and busy development section leads to an almost exact repetition of the exposition.

Avshalomov believes that the teenage Mozart "hit the mark" in the slow movement of K.168, a plaintive Andante that exhibits the "sudden coalescence" of Mozart's compositional skills: "the Mozart we've been waiting for is already here." In F minor, the movement exhibits a "pre-Baroque" fugal style. The third movement Menuetto, which Avshalomov contends "can get on your nerves like those string-activated dolls of yore," follows the traditional pattern of minuet, trio, and minuet.

The final Allegro is a fugue, the most highly developed form of contrapuntal imitation. Mozart uses a well-known fugue subject, one employed by Bach and Handel, and by Haydn in the fifth quartet of Op. 20. Here the gleeful fugue subject is introduced in the first violin and imitated in the descending order of instruments: second violin, viola and cello. Halfway through the movement, Mozart turns the fugue subject "upside-down and stands the quartet on its head, just for fun" (Avshalomov).

Like Webern, Debussy created a new tonal language, one that provided a musical counterpart to the Impressionist paintings and Symbolist poetry at the turn of the century. Not only did he transform the harmonic vocabulary, Debussy revolutionized the string quartet: "instead of being a group of four compatible companions," the quartet becomes "an ensemble of different instruments to be joined in different combinations." Debussy's quartet is "worlds away from the classical norms of quartet texture"; he "seems to be searching constantly for fluidity and constant alteration in contrast to the clear structures of the classical quartet"(Griffiths).

Berger describes the quartet's four complex movements. The opening notes of the first movement "make up the germ, the melodic cell from which the entire quartet unfolds and flows." Imaginative iterations of this cell and other melodies create "a procession of transformed shapes and guises 'now surging with great passion, now stated in stentorian splendor, now stretched and drawn out in length, now plaintively sung' until the movement races to its climactic resolution."

The second movement "offers a profusion of sparkling tonal effects," led by the viola playing an obstinately repeated, quickened version of the quartet's opening motif. After brilliant pizzicatos and scintillating cross-rhythms, the cello brings this section to a close and sets up a "murmuring accompaniment" over which the first violin plays the opening motif, now augmented. A lively pizzicato passage and other transformations of melodic material lead to the final measures in which the movement fades away.

After false starts in the second violin and viola, the third movement begins as the first violin sings a "languid melody that rocks back and forth in pitch." The viola takes one fragment of this melody and expands it as the tempo quickens. The movement escalates to an impassioned climax, after which the quiet rocking theme in the cello returns to conclude the movement.

The final movement continues the quiet mood of the third movement, its theme based on the original motif. The cello introduces a fugal passage based on a transformation of the germinal motif. The music grows faster as Debussy continues to spin out new melodies until the original motif returns in a "grandiose elongation." A coda containing a glimpse of the altered germinal motif brings the quartet to its close.