NDR Chamber Music Concert

A competition in a quintet

Chamber music for piano and wind instruments? This was something completely new when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his quintet for piano and winds in E flat major. Mozart was once again experimenting with the world of chamber music forms – and created something that was to be widely imitated. Ludwig van Beethoven, who had been pushed into competition with the Salzburg boy wonder by his father as a child, found Mozart’s work so inspiring that he also composed a quintet. It was a direct response to Mozart, in the same key and for the same instrumentation. Did he copy it on purpose – or was he even making a musical joke about Mozart’s themes? For all their stylistic similarities, both composers always retain their own highly individual musical language.