The Piano Concerto No. 27 in
B major,
K. 595, is
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 17565 December 1791), baptised as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition r ...
's last
piano concerto; it was first performed early in 1791, the year of his death.
History
The manuscript is dated 5 January 1791. However,
Alan Tyson's analysis of the paper on which Mozart composed the work indicated that Mozart used this paper between December 1788 and February 1789, which implies composition well before 1791.
Simon Keefe has written that the composition of the work dates from 1788.
By contrast,
Wolfgang Rehm
Wolfgang Rehm (3 September 1929 – 6 April 2017) was a German musicologist active mostly in music publishing, especially the '' Neue Mozart-Ausgabe''. He was on the board of its editorial team for decades, and personally edited operas and piano m ...
has stated that Mozart composed this concerto in late 1790 and early 1791.
Cliff Eisen Cliff Eisen (born 21 January 1952 in Toronto) is a Canadian musicologist and a Mozart expert. He was based in the Department of Music at King's College London. He studied at the University of Toronto and at Cornell University, and has taught at th ...
has discussed the controversy over the time of composition in his review of the published facsimile of the score.
Premiere
The concerto may have been first performed at a concert on 4 March 1791 in
Jahn's Hall by Mozart and the clarinetist
Joseph Beer
Joseph Beer (; 7 May 1908 – 23 November 1987) was a composer who worked mainly in the genres of operettas, singspiele, and operas.
Beer started composing music as a young man in Vienna in the 1930s. His operettas ' and ' premiered at the Z ...
.
[Deutsch 1965, 387] If so, this was Mozart's last appearance in a public concert,
as he fell ill in September 1791 and died on 5 December 1791. Another possibility is that it was premiered by Mozart's pupil
Barbara Ployer
Maria Anna Barbara or Babette Ployer (2 September 1765 – before April 1811) was an Austrian piano and composition pupil of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for whom he wrote two piano concertos in 1784, No. 14 KV. 449 and No. 17, KV. 453, which we ...
on the occasion of a public concert at the
Palais Auersperg
Palais Auersperg, originally called Palais Rosenkavalier, is a Baroque palace at Auerspergstraße 1 in the Josefstadt or eighth district of Vienna, Austria.
History
Palais Auersperg was built between 1706 and 1710 on the plot of the former ''Ro ...
in January 1791.
[ Dexter Edge, "Mozart's Reception in Vienna 1787–1791", in ''Wolfgang Amadé Mozart: Essays on his Life and his Music'', (Oxford, Clarendon 1996), p. 90]
Music
The work is scored for
flute, two
oboe
The oboe ( ) is a type of double reed woodwind instrument. Oboes are usually made of wood, but may also be made of synthetic materials, such as plastic, resin, or hybrid composites. The most common oboe plays in the treble or soprano range.
...
s, two
bassoons, two
horns Horns or The Horns may refer to:
* Plural of Horn (instrument), a group of musical instruments all with a horn-shaped bells
* The Horns (Colorado), a summit on Cheyenne Mountain
* ''Horns'' (novel), a dark fantasy novel written in 2010 by Joe Hill ...
, solo
piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keybo ...
and
strings, which makes it thinner than Mozart's other late concertos, all of which except for No. 23 have
trumpet
The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard ...
and
timpani
Timpani (; ) or kettledrums (also informally called timps) are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum categorised as a hemispherical drum, they consist of a membrane called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionally ...
.
It has three
movements
Movement may refer to:
Common uses
* Movement (clockwork), the internal mechanism of a timepiece
* Motion, commonly referred to as movement
Arts, entertainment, and media
Literature
* "Movement" (short story), a short story by Nancy Fu ...
:
Although all three movements are in a
major key
In music theory, the key of a piece is the group of pitches, or scale, that forms the basis of a musical composition in classical, Western art, and Western pop music.
The group features a '' tonic note'' and its corresponding '' chords'', ...
, minor keys are suggested, as is evident from the second
theme
Theme or themes may refer to:
* Theme (arts), the unifying subject or idea of the type of visual work
* Theme (Byzantine district), an administrative district in the Byzantine Empire governed by a Strategos
* Theme (computing), a custom graphical ...
of the first movement (in the dominant minor), as well as the presence of a remote minor key in the early
development
Development or developing may refer to:
Arts
*Development hell, when a project is stuck in development
*Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting
*Development (music), the process thematic material is reshaped
* Photograph ...
of that movement and of the tonic minor in the middle of the Larghetto.
Another interesting characteristic of the work is its rather strong thematic integration of the movements, which would become ever more important in the nineteenth century. The principal theme of the Larghetto, for instance, is revived as the second theme of the final movement (in measure 65). The principal theme for the finale was also used in Mozart's song "Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling" (also called "Komm, lieber Mai"), K. 596, which immediately follows this concerto in the
Köchel catalogue
The Köchel catalogue (german: Köchel-Verzeichnis, links=no) is a chronological catalogue of compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, originally created by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, in which the entries are abbreviated ''K.'', or ''KV''. The n ...
.
Mozart wrote down his
cadenzas for the first and third movements.
Simon Keefe has discussed the concerto in detail, with emphasis on the distinctive character and experiments in style of the concerto compared to Mozart's other concerti in this genre.
References
Sources
*
Deutsch, Otto Erich (1965) ''Mozart: A Documentary Biography''. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
External links
*
*
BBC Discovering Music(browse for .ram file for discussion of this work)
{{Authority control
27
Compositions in B-flat major
1788 compositions
1791 compositions