Piano Concerto No. 24 (Mozart)

The Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491, is a concerto composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for keyboard and orchestra. Mozart composed the concerto in the winter of 1785–1786, finishing it on 24 March 1786. The premiere was in early April 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The piece may have served as an outlet for a darker aspect of Mozarts creativity at the time he was composing his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro.

About Piano Concerto No. 24 (Mozart) in brief

Summary Piano Concerto No. 24 (Mozart)The Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491, is a concerto composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for keyboard and orchestra. Mozart composed the concerto in the winter of 1785–1786, finishing it on 24 March 1786. The premiere was in early April 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The work is one of only two minor-key piano concertos that Mozart. composed. The concerto is scored for one flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. The first of its three movements, Allegro, is in sonata form and is longer than any opening movement of Mozart’s earlier concertos. The second movement, Larghetto, in E♭ major—the relative major of C minor—features a strikingly simple principal theme. The final movement, Allegretto is a theme and eight variations in C major. The original score contains no tempo markings; the tempo for each movement is known only from the entries Mozart made into his catalogue. It is scored as a fortepiano, but Mozart used it as an term for an eighteenth-century harpsichord. 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. The score also contains late additions, including that of the second subject of the first movement’s orchestral exposition. 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. It was the third in a set of three concertos composed in quick succession, the others being No. 22 in E ♭ major and No. 23 in A major. Musicologist Arthur Hutchings declared it to be, taken as a whole, Mozart’s greatest piano concerto. The piece may have served as an outlet for a darker aspect of Mozarts creativity at the time he was composing his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro. The composer intended to perform the work himself, so he did not write out the soloist’s part in full. The instrumentation is the largest array of instruments for which Mozart has composed any of his concertos, with only two of the concertos for both oboes and clarinet. The clarinet was not at the. time a conventional orchestrastral instrument, but it was used in this concerto as an encompassed term that encompassed the term “fortepiano” This term is often used to refer to a harpichord, but the term is more commonly used to describe the instrument that is used for the solo instrument. The musicologist Robert D. Levin writes: “The richness of windority, due to the central timbral timbral time, is the central characteristic of the Fortepiano.”