Program Notes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Concerto for Fortepiano No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 In 1781, Mozart went freelance. It wasn’t entirely planned. The composer had been fired by the Archbishop of Salzburg, dismissed with the ‘kick to my arse’ he so enjoyed recalling. Deep down, Mozart knew the change would do him good. He moved to Vienna, where his industry, talent and imagination carried him to success. But so did a hugely popular and fastdeveloping piece of equipment: the piano. As Handel had before him, Mozart cocked an ear towards the slipstream of public taste, and got wise to what his ‘customers’ wanted. What they wanted was piano music played by him. In 1784 alone, Mozart wrote six piano concertos to play at his own subscription concerts in Vienna. Ticket income was healthy, and for a time Mozart was cruising. Then, in 1785, he changed gear. Over the next two years, Mozart significantly reduced his quantitative output of piano concertos but massively increased their depth, expression and architectural imagination in inverse proportion. His concerto numbered 20, written and performed in 1785, got the Viennese talking by dint of its predominating minor key (unusual at the time). All the while, Mozart was taking advantage of the instrument’s increasing capacity for expression and dynamic variance. A year later in 1786, Mozart delivered something similar but without that concerto’s light relief. He unveiled a concerto in C minor that maintains its tragic mood right to the very end. This concerto’s music is emphatically repetitious and anxiously chromatic, and also more ready to devolve its textures down into instrumental groups. It touches upon all twelve notes of the chromatic scale within the first eleven bars of its exposition (there are 88 more still to
come). The unusual three-in-a-bar gait, the leaps through awkward ‘seventh’ intervals and the nervous energy all look beyond Classicism’s principles of symmetry and perfection towards something more personal, more Romantic. There is balm (the E flat major Larghetto) and there is humour (the two majorkey diversions among the finale’s set of variations on a sinister dance). There is also a new status for woodwind instruments: in the Larghetto, piano and winds seem to hang on each others words while in the final movement theme and variations, the woodwinds take on the second variation. Otherwise, there can be little doubt that Mozart’s vision for the piano concerto as more than an entertainment has come to full fruition here. The score calls for Mozart’s biggest orchestra yet in a concerto (oboes and clarinets). It carries with it a feeling of grandeur fuelled by defiance, laying groundwork for Beethoven’s concertos and maybe even putting him on to the particular qualities of the key of C minor. The musicologist Wolfgang Rehm has referred to the concerto’s ‘veiled tragedy, suppressed sorrow and ominous tension’. ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?’ ... Non temer, amato bene”, K. 505 In the final days of 1786, Mozart was moved to write something deeply personal. Nancy Storace, the singer who had created the part of Susanna in his opera The Marriage of Figaro months earlier, announced her departure for London. In bidding her a musical farewell, Mozart turned to a valedictory text he’d already used for the opera Idomeneo, and set it as an aria ‘for Mlle Storace and me’. The Recitative and Aria Ch’io mi scordi di te? is rather more than both those things. It is effectively an exceptional hybrid of piano
2021-22 SEASON
17
