The Irresistible Narrativity of Mozart's G-Minor String Quintet, K. 516

Like most chamber music compositions, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's String Quintet in G minor, K. 516, lacks a descriptive text or explicit program. The quintet, completed in Vienna in 1787, has therefore traditionally been categorized as a work of “absolute” music, having no content other than the music itself. Many commentators, however, have nevertheless found the quintet evocative of a tragic narrative involving struggle, defeat, grief, and loss. Recent discoveries by cognitive neuroscientists have shown the universality, even the inherent necessity, of storytelling as the way humans organize sensory data into intelligible patterns, and these discoveries have been adapted by musicologists to provide new theories that can help us understand why we find the inherent narrativity of the quintet so compelling. This article uses old and new conceptual tools — topic theory, “markedness,” the meaning of musical gestures, musical themes as protagonists or “virtual agents,” and correlations between passages in the quintet and similar instrumental passages that accompany the action in Mozart's operas — for a hermeneutical analysis that demonstrates how thoroughly Mozart embedded the quintet with specific musical significations to create a coherent trajectory of narrative meaning. The article concludes with examples of how a narratological perspective can solve interpretive problems faced by performers of the quintet.