Piano Concerto No. 24 (Mozart) composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491, is a concerto composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for keyboard (usually a piano or fortepiano) and orchestra. Mozart composed the concerto in the winter of 1785–1786, finishing it on 24 March 1786, three weeks after completing his Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major. As he intended to perform the work himself, Mozart did not write out the soloist's part in full. The premiere was in early April 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Chronologically, the work is the twentieth of Mozart's 23 original piano concertos.
The work is one of only two minor-key piano concertos that Mozart composed, the other being the No. 20 in D minor. None of Mozart's other piano concertos features a larger array of instruments: the work is scored for strings, woodwinds, horns, trumpets and timpani. 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 minor.
The work is one of Mozart's most advanced compositions in the concerto genre. Its early admirers included Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. Musicologist Arthur Hutchings declared it to be, taken as a whole, Mozart's greatest piano concerto.Background
Mozart composed the concerto in the winter of 1785–86, during his fourth season in Vienna. 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. Mozart finished composing the No. 24 shortly before the premiere of his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro; the two works are assigned adjacent numbers of 491 and 492 in the Köchel catalogue. Although composed at the same time, the two works contrast greatly: the opera is almost entirely in major keys while the concerto is one of Mozart's few minor-key works. The pianist and musicologist Robert D. Levin suggests that the concerto, along with the two concertos that precede it, may have served as an outlet for a darker aspect of Mozart's creativity at the time he was composing the comic opera.The premiere of the concerto was on either 3 or 7 April 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna; Mozart featured as the soloist and conducted the orchestra from the keyboard.In 1800, Mozart's widow Constanze sold the original score of the work to the publisher Johann Anton André of Offenbach am Main. 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. The original score contains no tempo markings; the tempo for each movement is known only from the entries Mozart made into his catalogue. The orchestral parts in the original score are written in a clear manner. 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. This suggests that Mozart improvised much of the solo part when performing the work. The score also contains late additions, including that of the second subject of the first movement's orchestral exposition. There is the occasional notation error in the score, which musicologist Friedrich Blume attributed to Mozart having "obviously written in great haste and under internal strain".
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