Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus – Piano Concertos KV 414, 503

To say that the piano concertos, more than the symphonies, operas, church and chamber music, speak in Mozart’s own voice seems almost too facile: after all, here is the composer-performer, seated on stage, presenting himself as a consummate musician. But it is not really Mozart’s personal voice that speaks to us although it is no less Mozart’s for that. Rather, it is a voice that through music speaks for us, expressing our thoughts and feelings in ways we cannot. Traditionally, the power of this protean voice has been attributed to details of theme and harmony and to Mozart’s exploitation of a unique form more or less invented by him. But this ignores the fact that the concertos are more different than they are similar, and that both affect and effect depend not just on theme and harmony but, perhaps even more importantly, on character and sound.
Mozart’s attention to details of sound and affect, and his ability to provide his public with works they could not only listen to but also play and make their own, is apparent from the first set of concertos that he composed in Vienna, K413, 414 and 415. Even before the works were finished in the winter of 1782/83, Mozart advertised them in the Wiener Zeitung: “Herr Kapellmeister Mozart herewith apprises the highly honoured public of the publication of three new, recently-finished pianoforte concertos. These three concertos may be performed either with a large orchestra with wind instruments or merely a quattro, that is, with two violins, viola and violoncello.” This possibility to perform the concertos with string quartet is sometimes dismissed as a marketing ploy on Mozart’s part, but somewhere in his original conception of the works he may well have though of them as chamber-like: unique among his concerto autographs, the lowest part of the C major concerto, K415, was originally assigned to a cello. All three concertos may therefore have originated as works performable in a variety of circumstances and scorings.
The A major concerto K414 is certainly the most intimate of the set. It has the smallest orchestra, consisting only of strings, oboes and horns, and its themes related closely to other A major themes by Mozart, including those of the piano sonata K331, the clarinet quintet K581 and the piano concerto K488, all of which can be characterized as gentle, at times even nostalgic. And nostalgia is surely the operative gesture in the slow movement, which is though to be a tribute to his English mentor Johann Christian Bach: it includes a nearly exact quote from Bach’s overture to La calamita dei cuori. Mozart had probably learned of Johann Christian’s death, on 1 January 1782, only shortly before the composition of K414: on 10 April 1782 he wrote to his father, “I suppose you already know that the English Bach has died? What a loss to the musical world!”
It is no surprise that K414 and its companions were a success. Mozart himself described them as “a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, natural without being vapid. There are passage here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why (letter of 28 December 1782). At the same time, the concerto sets out a new, public path for Mozart. Gone is the overtly asymmetrical, harmonically overrich and sometimes disturbingly intense style of the late Salzburg works. Instead, Mozart’s first Viennese concertos display a leanness, precision, clarity of articulation and driving momentum that is only infrequently encountered in his pre-1782 concertos.
Cliff Eisen