Flute Quartet No. 3 in C major, K. 285b (Anh. 171)
볼프강 아마데우스 모차르트 작
Mozart’s Flute Quartet No. 3 in C major (K. 285b, also catalogued as K. Anh. 171) occupies a curious position in his chamber music: outwardly a light, salon-friendly flute quartet, yet anchored by unusually sophisticated formal thinking and a large-scale variation movement. Often overshadowed by the more frequently played D major quartet (K. 285), it repays attention for the way it balances concertante brilliance with a distinctly Viennese sense of instrumental dialogue.
Background and Context
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) turned seriously to the flute quartet—flute with violin, viola, and cello—he was engaging with a fashionable late-18th-century hybrid: essentially a string quartet whose top line is “colored” (and often virtuoso) thanks to a wind soloist. The Köchel-Verzeichnis entry for K. 285b confirms the scoring in concise form (fl, vl, vla, vlc) and places the work among Mozart’s “quartets with a wind instrument,” a niche in which he could combine conversational chamber writing with the soloistic habits of the concerto [1].
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K. 285b is typically grouped with Mozart’s earlier flute quartets K. 285 (D major) and K. 285a (G major), pieces associated with the commission Mozart received in Mannheim from the Dutch amateur flautist Ferdinand Dejean (often spelled De Jean) [2]. Yet K. 285b is also the “problem child” of the set: scholars and performers have long noted the work’s complicated genesis and its mixture of materials that seem to belong to different moments in Mozart’s development.
Composition and Dedication
The work’s cataloguing itself hints at uncertainty. Alongside the modern K. 285b designation, the Mozarteum’s Köchel-Verzeichnis lists the older “appendix” number K. Anh. 171 and even preserves an autographic sketch (measures 149–158 of the first movement), evidence that Mozart at least worked directly on the piece’s musical substance [1].
Older traditions sometimes place the quartet in 1778, and it is frequently discussed in connection with the Mannheim commission. However, modern reference accounts often argue that K. 285b as we know it was completed later—commonly placed around 1781–1782—despite its position next to K. 285 and K. 285a in the Köchel catalogue [3]. The Naxos booklet for a complete flute-quartet cycle likewise treats K. 285b as initially fragmentary and completed in 1781, by which time Mozart was established in Vienna and working on Die Entführung aus dem Serail (K. 384) [2].
As with the earlier flute quartets, the dedicatee is usually given as Dejean, though the uneven transmission and dating mean one should be cautious about imagining a single, straightforward “occasion” for K. 285b.
Form and Musical Character
Instrumentation
- Winds: flute
- Strings: violin, viola, cello [1]
K. 285b is distinctive within Mozart’s flute-quartet output for being in two movements, a design that immediately sets it apart from the three-movement K. 285 (with its famous Adagio) and from the later three-movement K. 298 [2].
Movements
- I. Allegro (C major; sonata-allegro design)
- II. Andantino — Theme and variations [3]
I. Allegro
The opening Allegro behaves like a compact concerto first movement translated into chamber proportions: the flute often carries the foreground, but the strings are far from mere accompaniment. What makes this movement especially engaging is Mozart’s tendency to “rotate” the thematic interest through the ensemble—letting the violin and viola participate in genuine motivic exchange rather than simply filling harmony. The surviving sketch noted by the Mozarteum underscores that Mozart worked through details of the movement’s interior, rather than merely copying or arranging a finished model [1].
II. Andantino — Theme and variations
The second movement is the quartet’s center of gravity: a broad theme-and-variations sequence that turns the ensemble into a miniature stage for character changes. One of its most attractive features is the distribution of spotlight—the variations can feel like a succession of chamber “arias,” where each instrument takes a turn at expressive prominence. In the Naxos commentary, this movement is described as offering a solo variation for each instrument, followed by a dreamy slow variation and a concluding turn toward a minuet-like, scherzo-tinged character [2].
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This movement also illustrates Mozart’s practical habit of reuse and transformation. A widely repeated claim is that the Andantino variations draw on music later connected with the Serenade No. 10 (“Gran Partita”), K. 361, a reminder that Mozart treated chamber genres as a laboratory for ideas that could migrate into larger forms [3]. Even if one brackets the thorny details of borrowing and chronology, the audible result is clear: K. 285b is not merely “pleasant background music,” but an experiment in how variation form can sustain a long arc of contrast and return.
Reception and Legacy
K. 285b has never achieved the ubiquitous concert life of Mozart’s late string quartets or piano concertos, partly because its authorship and completion history have made it less straightforward to present than the confidently finished K. 285. Yet in modern performance it has become an important part of the flute quartet’s core Classical repertoire—valued for its idiomatic flute writing, its balanced chamber texture, and its unusually expansive variation finale.
In a broader view of Mozart’s output, K. 285b deserves attention precisely because it sits between worlds: it looks back to the “social” chamber music market that welcomed light, brilliant flute pieces, while simultaneously pointing ahead to Mozart’s Viennese maturity in its careful motivic workmanship and in the imaginative pacing of its variations. In short, it is a small-scale work with large-scale craft—one that reveals how much compositional seriousness Mozart could invest in a seemingly modest genre.
[1] International Mozarteum Foundation, Köchel-Verzeichnis entry for KV 285b/01 (K. Anh. 171): key, instrumentation, publications, and reference to an autographic sketch.
[2] Naxos Music Library booklet (Brilliant Classics BC96863 PDF): discussion of the flute quartets’ Mannheim commission context and notes that K. 285b was fragmentary and completed in 1781; includes movement timings and overview of the variation movement.
[3] Wikipedia: Flute Quartet No. 3 (Mozart), K. Anh. 171/285b — overview, two-movement structure, and commonly cited later dating (c. 1781–82) plus remarks on the variation movement’s connections to other Mozart works.