Mozart C Minor Piano Concerto

[Rolan Sacco]

Thework is one of Mozart's most advanced compositions in the concerto genre. Its early admirers included Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. Musicologist Arthur Hutchings declared it to be, taken as a whole, Mozart's greatest piano concerto.

In 1800, Mozart's widow Constanze sold the original score of the work to the publisher Johann Anton Andr of Offenbach am Main. It passed through several private hands during the nineteenth century before Sir George Donaldson, a Scottish philanthropist, donated it to the Royal College of Music in 1894. The College still houses the manuscript today.[8] The original score contains no tempo markings; the tempo for each movement is known only from the entries Mozart made into his catalogue.[2] The orchestral parts in the original score are written in a clear manner.[5] The solo part, on the other hand, is often incomplete: on many occasions in the score Mozart notated only the outer parts of passages of scales or broken chords. This suggests that Mozart improvised much of the solo part when performing the work.[9] The score also contains late additions, including that of the second subject of the first movement's orchestral exposition.[10] There is the occasional notation error in the score, which musicologist Friedrich Blume attributed to Mozart having "obviously written in great haste and under internal strain".[11]

The concerto is scored for one flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.[2] This is the largest array of instruments for which Mozart composed any of his concertos.[12]

It is one of only two of Mozart's piano concertos that are scored for both oboes and clarinets (the other, his concerto for two pianos, has clarinets only in the revised version). The clarinet was not at the time a conventional orchestral instrument. Robert D. Levin writes: "The richness of wind sonority, due to the inclusion of oboes and clarinets, is the central timbral characteristic of [the concerto]: time and again in all three movements the winds push the strings completely to the side."[5]

The solo instrument for the concerto is scored as a "cembalo". This term often denotes a harpsichord, but in this concerto, Mozart used it as a generic term that encompassed the fortepiano, an eighteenth-century predecessor of the modern piano that among other things was more dynamically capable than the harpsichord.[13]

The first movement follows the standard outline of a sonata form concerto movement of the Classical period. It begins with an orchestral exposition, which is followed by a solo exposition, a development section, a recapitulation, a cadenza and a coda. Within this conventional outline, Mozart engages in extensive structural innovation.[15]

The orchestral exposition, 99 measures long, presents two groups of thematic material, one primary and one secondary, both in the tonic of C minor.[15] The orchestra opens the principal theme in unison, but not powerfully: the dynamic marking is piano.[16] The theme is tonally ambiguous, not asserting the home key of C minor until its final cadence in the thirteenth measure.[17] It is also highly chromatic: in its 13 measures, it utilises all 12 notes of the chromatic scale.[2]

The solo exposition follows its orchestral counterpart, and it is here that convention is discarded from the outset: the piano does not enter with the principal theme. Instead, it has an 18-measure solo passage. It is only after this passage that the principal theme appears, carried by the orchestra. The piano then picks up the theme from its seventh measure.[18] Another departure from convention is that the solo exposition does not re-state the secondary theme from the orchestral exposition. Instead, a succession of new secondary thematic material appears. Musicologist Donald Tovey considered this introduction of new material to be "utterly subversive of the doctrine that the function of the opening tutti [the orchestral exposition] was to predict what the solo had to say."[18]

The orchestral theme is then developed: the motif of the theme's fourth and fifth measures descends through the circle of fifths, accompanied by an elaborate piano figuration. After this, the development proceeds to a stormy exchange between the piano and the orchestra, which the twentieth-century Mozart scholar Cuthbert Girdlestone describes as "one of the few [occasions] in Mozart where passion seems really unchained",[21] and which Tovey describes as a passage of "fine, severe massiveness".[18] The exchange resolves to a passage in which the piano plays a treble line of sixteenth notes, over which the winds add echoes of the main theme. This transitional passage ultimately modulates to the home key of C minor, bringing about the start of the recapitulation with the conventional re-statement, by the orchestra, of the movement's principal theme.[21]

The wide range of thematic material presented in the orchestral and solo expositions poses a challenge for the recapitulation. Mozart manages to recapitulate all of the themes in the home key of C minor. The necessarily compressed themes are presented in a different order, and in their restated form contain few virtuosic moments for the soloist.[22][23] The last theme to be recapitulated is the secondary theme of the orchestral exposition, which has not been heard for some 400 measures and is now adorned by a passage of triplets from the piano. The recapitulation concludes with the piano playing arpeggiated sixteenths before a cadential trill leads into a ritornello. The ritornello in turn leads into a fermata that prompts the soloist's cadenza.[24]

Mozart did not write down a cadenza for the movement, or at least there is no evidence of him having done so.[25] Many later composers and performers, including Johannes Brahms, Ferruccio Busoni, Alfred Schnittke and Gabriel Faur, have composed their own.[26][27] Uniquely among Mozart's concertos, the score does not direct the soloist to end the cadenza with a cadential trill. The omission of the customary trill is likely to have been deliberate, with Mozart choosing to have the cadenza connect directly to the coda without one.[28]

The conventional Mozartian coda concludes with an orchestral tutti and no written-out part for the soloist. In this movement, Mozart breaks with convention: the soloist interrupts the tutti with a virtuosic passage of sixteenth notes and accompanies the orchestra through to the final pianissimo C-minor chords.[29][30]

This theme is, in the words of Michael Steinberg, one of "extreme simplicity".[33] Donald Tovey refers to the fourth bar, extremely bare and lacking any ornamentation, as "naive", but considers that Mozart intended for it to be so.[25] Mozart's first sketch of the movement was much more complex. He likely simplified the theme to provide a greater contrast with the dark intensity of the first movement.[34] After the orchestra repeats the principal theme, there is a very simple bridge or transitional passage that Girdlestone calls "but a sketch" to be ornamented by the soloist, arguing that "to play it as printed is to betray the memory of Mozart".[35][b]

The tempo marking for the movement is Allegretto. Rosen opines that this calls for a march-like speed and argues that the movement is "generally taken too fast under the delusion that a quick tempo will give it a power commensurate with that of the opening movement."[29] Pianist Angela Hewitt sees in the movement not a march but a "sinister dance".[7]

The movement opens with the first violins stating the theme over a string and wind accompaniment. This theme consists of two eight-measure phrases, each repeated: the first phrase modulates from C minor to the dominant, G minor; the second phrase modulates back to C minor.[42] The soloist does not play any part in the statement of the theme, entering only in Variation I. Here, the piano ornaments the theme over an austere string accompaniment.[43]

After the cadenza, the soloist opens the eighth and final variation alone, with the orchestra joining after 19 measures. The arrival of the final variation also brings a change in metre: from cut common time to compound duple time.[47] Both the final variation and the coda which follows contain numerous neapolitan-sixth chords. Girdlestone referred to the "haunting" effect of these chords and stated that the coda ultimately "proclaims with desperation the triumph of the minor mode".[46]

Ludwig van Beethoven admired the concerto and it may have influenced his Piano Concerto No. 3, also in C minor.[31][44] After hearing the work in a rehearsal, Beethoven reportedly remarked to a colleague that "[w]e shall never be able to do anything like that."[44][48] Johannes Brahms also admired the concerto, encouraging Clara Schumann to play it, and wrote his own cadenza for the first movement.[49] Brahms referred to the work as a "masterpiece of art and full of inspired ideas."[50]

Among modern and twentieth-century scholars, Cuthbert Girdlestone states that the concerto "is in all respects one of [Mozart's] greatest; we would fain say: the greatest, were it not impossible to choose between four or five of them."[46] Referring to the "dark, tragic and passionate" nature of the concerto, Alfred Einstein states that "it is hard to imagine the expression on the faces of the Viennese public" when Mozart premiered the work.[34] The musicologist Simon P. Keefe, in an exegesis of all of Mozart's piano concertos, writes that the No. 24 is "a climactic and culminating work in Mozart's piano concerto oeuvre, firmly linked to its predecessors, yet decisively transcending them at the same time."[51] The verdict of the Mozart scholar Alexander Hyatt King is that the concerto is "not only the most sublime of the whole series but also one of the greatest pianoforte concertos ever composed".[52] Arthur Hutchings's view is that "whatever value we put upon any single movement from the Mozart concertos, we shall find no work greater as a concerto than this K. 491, for Mozart never wrote a work whose parts were so surely those of 'one stupendous whole'."[40]

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