Piano Concerto No. 22, K.482

Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, who began calling himself Wolfgango Amadeo around 1770 during his first trip to Italy and switched to Wolfgang Amadè (an Italian form of Theophilus) in 1777, but who only used Amadeus in jest, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He entered this piano concerto into his catalog on December 16, 1785, and played the premiere a week later, on December 23, as an entr’acte at a performance of the oratorio Esther by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Antonio Salieri, who conducted the oratorio, may also have conducted the concerto. Mozart left no cadenzas for this concerto.

In addition to the solo piano, the score for the Piano Concerto No. 22 calls for an orchestra of 1 flute, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

Between the end of 1783 and the early summer of 1788, Mozart wrote a baker’s dozen of piano concertos, all but one of the series falling into the span from February 1784 (K.449 in E-flat) and December 1786 (K.503 in C). In those five years, which were the years both of Mozart’s most delirious public success and of his great decline in popular favor, he also wrote, among many other things, the last three of the six string quartets dedicated to Haydn and the D major quartet, K.499, the two piano quartets, the quintet for piano with winds, the viola quintets in C and G minor, Eine kleine Nacht­musik, the Prague Symphony, Figaro, and Don Giovanni. In 1784, hardly able to keep up with the demand for his own appearances as pianist, he wrote six concertos, then three each in 1785 and 1786. K.482, written in the middle of Figaro, is the last of the 1785 set. Both majestic and gentle— musicologist Cuthbert Girdle­stone aptly says that “combining grace and ma­jesty…this one is the queenliest” of Mozart’s concertos’—it offers a remarkable contrast to its two predecessors, the D minor, K.466, and the C major, K.467, both of them hyperinventive and audaciously personal. The E-flat concerto and the lovely A major, K.488, that followed two-and-a-half months later, are a gentle interlude in the series. With the C minor concerto, K.491 (March 1786), and the grand C major, K.503 (De­cember 1786), Mozart returned to a denser manner of composition and to a higher level of intellectual ambition.

Mozart begins here with a formula we find often in his pieces in E-flat, a firm, fanfare-like phrase and a quiet response. This is one of his trumpets-and-drums concertos, though in E-flat the sonority is mellow rather than brilliant. Mozart, being Mozart, can make something remarkable even of these conventional fanfares—the sudden fortissimo in the middle of the second measure in the Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola, for example, or here the odd phrase-length of three bars. The really personal note, however, comes in the answer, which here consists of a series of softly dissonant suspensions in two horns with the two bassoons in unison providing a bass. The harmonies outlined by that bass are not extraordinary; the specific articulation and presentation, on the other hand, is altogether individual and delightful. (It is also, on the most modest possible scale, an example of Mozart’s post-1782 sense of texture.) Statement and answer are repeated, only this time the horn suspensions are given a sound never before heard in one of Mozart’s concertos, the sound of clarinets, still a novel instrument in the middle-’80s and one for whose round softness Mozart had a special feeling. The bass to the clarinets, everything now being an octave higher than before, is given to non-bass instruments, namely violins. In twenty seconds of music, Mozart has set the stage for us. It is a movement rich in lyric themes, this Allegro, relatively casual in its development, exceptionally inventive in its non-automatic recapitulation.

We read that at the first performance in Vienna the audience demanded (and got) an encore of the Andante. It is a most wonderful movement. Its theme is a lament, long and irregular, for muted strings, all broken lines, sighs, and pathetic silences. We hear three variations on this paragraph, the first two for the piano alone or with a quiet accompaniment of strings, the third an extraordinary dialogue that engages the entire orchestra (save trumpets and drums, which are silent throughout this movement). But on either side of Variation II Mozart puts an independent episode, the first for winds alone, the second a string-accompanied duet for flute and bassoon. The last variation, more expansive than the theme and the two variations that came before, spills into a coda that, for pathos and magic of harmony, surpasses everything we have yet heard. The Andante is the concerto’s true center, sensuous, deeply pathetic, surprising and complex, yet utterly clear.

From there Mozart moves into a 6/8 hunting finale on a theme that is a slightly more formal, less capricious variant of the one in the B-flat concerto, K.450, of March 1784. Like the finale of the earlier great concerto in E-flat, K.271 (January 1777), this movement is interrupted by a slower interlude in 3/4, though not so specifically minuet-like this time. It harks back to the textures of the Andante, beginning with the wind music from the world of serenades and looking ahead to the perfumes of Fiordiligi’s and Dorabella’s garden, and alternating these fragrant sounds with the union of the piano and the orchestral strings. Here in the Allegro portion of the movement are several in­stances where Mozart wrote shorthand rather than a completely realized piano figuration, passages where the soloist is asked to meet the challenge of putting flesh on the bones and color on the skin. The formality and simplicity of the opening theme allow room for subtle alterations of shape and harmony at its various returns. The whole move­ment is indeed a feast of gentle wit, the best of all the jokes—and it is a wistful one—being saved for the very end.

Michael Steinberg

Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published three compilations of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and the great works for chorus and orchestra. In May 2026, Oxford published Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964-1976, a compilation of his influential reviews, including many of the BSO.

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Mozart’s Concerto No. 22, K.482, took place on November 3 and 4, 1933, with soloist Egon Petri under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky.