Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, K.467
Joannes Chrisostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart — who began calling himself Wolfgango Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè in 1777 (he used “Amadeus” only in jest) — was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. Mozart composed his C major piano concerto, K.467, in February 1785, entering it into his own thematic catalog of his works on March 9, 1785, and playing the first performance the next day, in Vienna.
In addition to the solo piano, the score of Mozart’s K.467 calls for an orchestra of 1 flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Between February 1784, when he finished the E-flat piano concerto, K.449, and March 1786, when he entered into his thematic catalogue both the A major concerto, K.488, and the C minor concerto, K.491, Mozart wrote eleven concertos for piano and orchestra. During this period, Mozart was living in Vienna; in the early part of 1785 he would achieve the height of his popularity as both pianist and composer, appearing regularly at the homes of the nobility and in public, and supporting himself also with a regular succession of students. On March 3, 1784, he wrote to his father Leopold that he had participated in twenty-two concerts in the space of thirty-eight days (“I don’t think that in this way I can possibly get out of practice,” he observed). The following fall he played ten concerts during an eleven-day period.
On March 16, 1781, Mozart had come to Vienna fresh from the triumph of Idomeneo, which was commissioned for Munich and premiered there six weeks earlier, on January 29. He had been summoned to Vienna by his employer, the Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg, on the occasion of the Emperor Joseph II’s accession to the throne. The Archbishop’s social and financial ill-treatment of Mozart, particularly distasteful so soon after the Munich success, led rather quickly to the composer’s decision to resign from the Archbishop’s service and to make his own living in Vienna. In July 1782, the premiere at the Burgtheater of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) won over Vienna’s operagoing public, as would Le nozze di Figaro four years later. Mozart’s marriage to Constanze Weber, the sister of his earlier love Aloysia, took place on August 4, 1782, with only grudging approval from his father, and a conciliatory visit to Salzburg with Constanze the following summer didn’t especially help. But the trip back to Vienna provided the occasion for Mozart to write the Linz Symphony (No. 36) when a concert was arranged there in his honor and he didn’t have an appropriate work at hand.
In February 1785, Leopold was visiting with Mozart in Vienna, where he was able to witness firsthand the evidence of his son’s success; and it certainly did not hurt to hear Haydn’s comment that “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name,” this on the occasion of a read-through of several string quartets newly completed by Mozart and dedicated to the older composer. Only weeks later, Mozart completed the C major piano concerto, K.467: it is dated March 9, 1785, and Mozart performed it the next day at the Burgtheater.
The C major concerto could not have provided greater contrast to the one that preceded it, the somber D minor concerto, K.466, dated February 10, which was Mozart’s first in the minor mode. K.467 is brightly colored, filled with festive, trumpet-and-drums panoply. Mozart did not write any symphonies between the Linz of 1783 and the Prague (No. 38) of December 1786, concentrating instead on the piano concerto, which showed him to full advantage as both composer and performer. Indeed, the contrast of moods and colors evident in the successive D minor and C major concertos is itself enough to support Alfred Einstein’s assertion that the concertos of this period are “symphonic in the highest sense, and Mozart did not need to turn to the field of pure symphony again until that of the concerto was closed to him.”
In his manuscript, Mozart did not include a tempo marking for the opening movement of this concerto; it was only when he entered the work into his catalog some weeks later that he specified “Allegro maestoso.” As in so many of his piano concertos, the orchestral exposition is noteworthy for the perfect sense of balance with which Mozart treats the various components of the orchestra, particularly the interplay of strings and winds. At the same time, it is in the way he introduces the soloist that he manages one of his most alluring touches (and this is where an audience hearing the piece for the first time would have expected a particularly inventive gambit). Here, the orchestra comes to a full stop, and unexpected thoughts from the solo oboe, bassoon, and then flute usher in the soloist who, after sharing the main theme with the orchestra, manages throughout the movement to lead the music in frequent and unanticipated new directions, some surprisingly melancholy, others bitingly and chromatically colored.
The F major Andante — popularized decades ago in Swedish director Bo Widerberg’s 1967 film Elvira Madigan — is one of Mozart’s great achievements in melody. The aura of relaxation derives partly from its being set in the subdominant of the home key, which imparts a softer, warmer feel to the music than the dominant, G major, would have afforded; partly from the magic Mozart works with the orchestral accompaniment, with its muted strings, pizzicato bass line, and continuous cushion of triplets; and partly from the form, a sort of free variation scheme in which the orchestra introduces the theme and in which the pianist, once having initiated the second statement, is the ever-present singer. But it is the melody itself, with its consistently touching turns of phrase, that most directly and hypnotically draws us into the music.
The last movement is one of Mozart’s typically extroverted rondo-finales. This one is marked “Allegro vivace assai” — a “very lively Allegro” — and has something of the carnival about it as it mixes wit, lyricism, and touches of pathos, all — again — in perfect balance.
Marc Mandel
Marc Mandel, former Director of Program Publications for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, joined the staff of the BSO in November 1978 and managed the orchestra’s program book from 1979 until his retirement in July 2020.
The first American performance of Mozart’s C major piano concerto, K.467, took place on February 16, 1876, at the Music Hall in Boston; William Mason was soloist, with the Theodore Thomas Orchestra.
The first Boston Symphony performances of K.467 were conducted by Alfredo Casella, with Walter Gieseking as soloist, in January 1927.