Movement for a String Quintet in B♭ major, K. 514a (fragment)
av Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s Movement for a String Quintet in B♭ major (K. 514a) is an unfinished, single-movement survival from Vienna in 1787—his thirty-first year—scored for the classic “viola quintet” ensemble (two violins, two violas, cello) [1]. Obscure and sparsely documented, it offers only a brief glimpse into the sound-world Mozart was expanding in the same Viennese period that produced his great mature string quintets.
What Is Known
Only one incomplete movement survives of this B♭-major string quintet, catalogued as K. 514a (also transmitted as K. Anh. 80/514a) [1]. The scoring matches Mozart’s standard late string-quintet texture—2 violins, 2 violas, and cello—and the surviving sources point to Vienna in 1787, when Mozart was intensifying his chamber-music writing alongside major theatrical and instrumental projects [2]. Beyond these basics, it remains unclear whether the movement was conceived as the opening of a complete four-movement quintet (Mozart’s usual plan in the genre) or as an isolated experiment later abandoned.
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Musical Content
What survives is, in essence, “Mozart thinking in quintet textures”: a richer middle-register palette than the string quartet, with the second viola available to thicken harmony, trade inner-voice motives, and turn accompanimental writing into dialogue. Even in fragmentary form, the B♭ major tonality suggests an idiom closer to Mozart’s expansive, warm-toned Viennese chamber works than to the stormier minor-key rhetoric of the same year—yet the movement breaks off before it can articulate a full large-scale argument. As a document, K. 514a is less a “lost quintet” than a small, unfinished window onto Mozart’s late-1780s fascination with the viola-quintet sonority and its conversational possibilities.
[1] IMSLP work page: basic catalog data (K. Anh. 80/514a), key, date, instrumentation; links to scans/editions.
[2] Classical Music (Gramophone) review discussing Mozart’s 1787 string quintets K. 515 and K. 516 and their Viennese context.