String Quartet No. 19 in C Major

There are few more extraordinary moments in Mozart’s music than the “Adagio” introduction to his String Quartet No. 19, the last of the six quartets he dedicated to Haydn, which was composed between 1784 and 1785. It’s a passage whose daring harmonies justifiably earned the work its nickname of “Dissonance”. Over a bass line of gently throbbing, repeated notes on the cello, the other string instruments weave a sequence of seemingly disconnected melodic lines that search in vain for some kind of resolution. Mozart appears to stretch the musical tension almost to the breaking point before eventually achieving some semblance of stability and leading us directly into the lively and exhilarating first-movement “Allegro”. The dark shadows that are explored in the introduction inevitably surface from time to time in the rest of the 19th Quartet, good examples being the anguished harmonies near the close of the second-movement “Andante,” the intense trio section of the “Minuet” and the somewhat abrupt changes of key in the middle of the otherwise good-humoured finale.