String Quartet No. 12 in B♭ major, K. 172 — Mozart’s Viennese Quartet in Sunny Counterpoint
de Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s String Quartet No. 12 in B♭ major, K. 172 was composed in Vienna in late summer 1773, when the composer was just 17. One of the six so‑called “Viennese Quartets” (K. 168–173), it shows Mozart rapidly absorbing the newer, more conversational quartet style associated with Joseph Haydn—while still writing with the buoyant ease of a teenage prodigy.
Background and Context
Mozart’s String Quartet No. 12 in B♭ major, K. 172 belongs to a brief but telling moment in 1773, when he and Leopold Mozart were in Vienna and Wolfgang was listening hard to what the city’s composers were doing with the string quartet. The six quartets K. 168–173 are widely grouped as the “Viennese Quartets,” composed in Vienna in late 1773 and standing apart from Mozart’s earlier, more divertimento-like Milanese quartets in both ambition and four-movement layout [1].
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In broad outline, K. 172 is an early answer to a question that would preoccupy Mozart for the rest of his career: how to make four string players sound like four characters in conversation, rather than a first violin supported by accompaniment. The quartet is not yet a “Haydn” quartet in the mature, psychologically charged sense of the 1780s, but it is already alert to dialogue, to imitation, and to the pleasures of giving each voice something to say—especially within the courtly framework of a B♭-major work.
Composition and Dedication
The International Mozarteum Foundation dates K. 172 to Vienna, August–September 1773, and lists it as an authenticated work with an extant autograph [2]. The scoring is the standard string quartet complement:
- Strings: 2 violins, viola, cello [2]
The quartet was not published in Mozart’s lifetime. The “Viennese Quartets” appear to have been issued only posthumously; Wikipedia notes publication by Johann André in 1801 as Mozart’s Op. 94 [1]. (IMSLP’s catalog entry for K. 172 likewise places first publication around 1800, in Offenbach by André.) [3]
No dedication is securely attached to K. 172; instead, its significance lies in what it signals: Mozart experimenting with quartet craft in the same city where he would, a decade later, reinvent his quartet style in the six works dedicated to Haydn.
Form and Musical Character
K. 172 follows the now-standard four-movement plan—fast, slow, minuet, fast—shared by the entire K. 168–173 set [1]. The movements are:
- I. Allegro spiritoso [1]
- II. Adagio (E♭ major) [1]
- III. Menuetto – Trio (Trio in G minor) [1]
- IV. Allegro assai [1]
If the opening Allegro spiritoso projects an outgoing B♭-major confidence, the Adagio’s move to E♭ major (the subdominant) provides a warmer, more expansive singing space—a tonal choice that already feels “Viennese” in its ease and breadth. The finale, Allegro assai, keeps the work on its feet: brisk, clean-lined, and geared toward the kind of articulate, ensemble-friendly brilliance Mozart knew could land immediately in a salon or courtly setting.
What most helps K. 172 stand out within this 1773 group is the way Mozart begins to think contrapuntally inside a social dance type. A later survey of Mozart’s chamber music notes that, in the B♭ quartet, he pushes “canonic imitation” particularly far in the minuet—an early sign of the composer’s delight in learned techniques deployed with a smiling face [4]. The effect is not academic display for its own sake; rather, it makes the minuet feel like a textured conversation in which voices chase, answer, and overlap—an anticipation, in miniature, of the more integrated part-writing Mozart would later achieve in the “Haydn” quartets.
Reception and Legacy
Because K. 172 and its companion quartets were published only after Mozart’s death, they did not help shape his public reputation in the way the later quartets did; their legacy has been quieter, living primarily in the repertory of ensembles interested in Mozart’s apprenticeship to Viennese quartet style [1]. Yet this very modesty is part of their appeal. Heard alongside the Milanese quartets (K. 155–160) and then the great leap of K. 387–465, K. 172 functions as a clear “middle panel”: Mozart discovering how four equal instruments can create drama through texture, imitation, and pacing rather than mere brilliance.
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For listeners and performers today, K. 172 repays attention as a vivid 1773 snapshot—Mozart at 17, already turning technique into charm, and beginning to treat the quartet not as polite background music but as a small-scale theater of musical personalities.
[1] Wikipedia — overview of the “Viennese Quartets” K. 168–173 (Vienna, late 1773), publication notes, and movement list for K. 172.
[2] International Mozarteum Foundation (Köchel Catalogue, KV) — K. 172 work entry with dating (Vienna, 08–09/1773) and instrumentation.
[3] IMSLP — K. 172 general information (key, movements, year/date and place, instrumentation, first publication information).
[4] Christer Malmberg summarizing Zaslaw’s chamber-music catalogue (“The Compleat Mozart”) — note on canonic imitation in the minuet of K. 172.