Mozart’s first and last quintets – he wrote them when he was just 17 and in the last year of his life respectively. He started writing his first viola quintet while Haydn was writing his first serious string quartets, the opus 20 series: chamber music as a genre was still in its infancy at the time. But when Mozart wrote his last viola quintet, it was very different: he alone had composed sixteen string quartets and seven piano trios. Together, these two quintets are a monument to the enormous leap forward that chamber music had made in a short amount of time.