Location
Mozart Piano Quartet #2 in Eb major, K 493 (1786)
Walton Piano Quartet in D minor (1919)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was a prolific and influential Austrian composer of the classical era. Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a musician at the Salzburg court. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. Mozart received a commission for three piano quartets in 1785 from the publisher F.A. Hoffmeister. Hoffmeister thought the G minor Quartet was too difficult and that the public would not buy it, so he released him from the obligation of completing the set. Nine months later, he composed the Eb major piano quartet anyway.
Sir William Turner Walton (1902-1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in many classical genres. His best known works include Façade, Belshazzar's Feast, Viola Concerto, First Symphony, and the British coronation anthems Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre. Born in Oldham, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. After university, he was taken up by the literary Sitwell siblings, who provided him with a home and cultural education. His earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Façade, which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist. The Piano Quartet was completed in 1919 when he was 16.