One of the players told us that the Mozart had been part of a projected set of six quartets which his publisher had cancelled, complaining that the first two were too difficult for prospective purchasers.
Who were these purchasers to have been? In the days before radio, TV and cinema, when all households who could afford one had a pianoforte, a lot of people played chamber music. There was good money to be made selling sheet music in various instrumental combinations. String quartets, piano duets, piano trios, string trios, clarinet quartets and so on. Listening to the Mozart quartet I found myself sympathising with the publisher. The piano part in particular was little short of a concerto, something which even a good amateur would struggle to get round, lovely though the music was.
The problems with the genre were even more evident in the Brahms. Again, a ferociously difficult piano part, written much more heavily than the Mozart, against which the three strings struggled to make themselves heard. And the substance of the music, darker, weightier, did not have the character of a salon piece: this was a concert work on a symphonic scale, ending in C major, but a troubled C major more like the dominant of F minor, with that sense of major key unease that Brahms does so well. Who could imagine the enthusiastic amateur sitting down after dinner to bash through this?
I mention all this because the piano quartet seems to me to exemplify a tired genre. Yes of course, you could still write one now: if you got rid of the heaviness of the piano writing, and used the instrument to colour and harmonise the weaving string lines, there would still be plenty of mileage in it. But who would play it, and where? Not amateurs of course; but what about professionals?
The players I went to listen to, all solid pros from the city's Conservatoire, are trying to set up a chamber music series, and must have been dismayed to find themselves playing to about thirty people. It was early days of course, and these things sometimes take time to grow. The concert had a retiring collection rather than an entrance fee, as we were reminded at least once too often by the players, but you cannot make a living from the contributions of thirty divided by four. As someone with ten years' experience of putting on concerts to a public that is largely indifferent to classical music, there was a certain rueful recognition in this: the sight of people protected to some extent from the realities of the outside world being brought up sharp by row upon row of empty seats.
For the problem faced by Mozart and his publisher is still with us. Who are the purchasers of chamber music - live or in sheet music form - now? For that matter, who are the purchasers of orchestral music now? That's a subject for another day, save to say that for every hundred people who go to a few orchestral concerts a year, there will be only half a dozen who go to a few chamber concerts as well.
