Piano Concerto No. 14 (Mozart)

History

The Piano Concerto in E-flat is the first work that Mozart entered into his personal catalog, a notebook of his music which he kept for the rest of his life, indicating the main themes and dates of completion of each work. From this primary source, we learn that he finished the concerto on February 9, 1784. Mozart had begun the concerto while writing the three previous ones for his subscription concerts of 1782–3. However, he did not resume work on it until 1784, when he completed it alongside the 15th and 16th concertos (K. 450 and 451). In a letter to his father, having mentioned the technical difficulty of these concertos, Mozart then adds 'The one in E-flat does not belong at all to the same category. It is a concerto of an entirely special manner'.

While critics such as Charles Rosen, Cuthbert Girdlestone and Arthur Hutchings have hailed K.450 and K.451 as heralding a new epoch in Mozart's concerto writing, opinions on K.449 are more qualified. Girdlestone regarded it as 'something exceptional', describing the first movement as ''born of an unstable, restless mood, sometimes petulant and irascible'. Alfred Einstein noted its singular character, commenting that 'Mozart never wrote another concerto like it, either before or afterwards.

Like his earlier concertos, Nos. 11, K. 413, 12, K. 414, and 13, K. 415, Mozart wrote the E-flat Piano Concerto for his subscription concerts, "either with a large orchestra with wind instruments or merely a quattro". Neal Zaslaw has pointed out that this most likely meant performance with a string section of four parts, rather than one instrument to each part.

Structure

The concerto is scored for 2 oboes, 2 French horns and strings, and it is in three movements:

|Allegro vivace () |Andantino cantabile (B major, ) |Allegro ma non troppo ( – )

I. Allegro vivace

The first movement begins in a time signature, an unusual feature among Mozart's 23 original piano concertos. Among them only this concerto, the eleventh, and twenty-fourth open with a movement in .

The first phrase of this concerto begins ambiguously. A unison E followed by a C, then a G, is followed by the dominant chord's leading tone (A) trilled up to the dominant, B. This progression seems to suggest a dominant cadence in the dominant key of B. In other words, C minor to F to B (ii – V – I in B). There is an immediate modulation, through a fiery C-minor passage, into B major. Here a possible second theme is heard, played by strings, winds not coming in until its later strain (near the modulation back into E).

The first movement ventures off from the normal conception of the concerto. Usually, when it comes time for the cadenza at the end of the recapitulation, the soloists will have a cadential trill on the tonic after which the orchestra will play part of the ritornello leading to the cadential I, at which point the soloists performs the cadenza. However, instead of the trill being accompanied by strings, it is interrupted by them on the second beat and ends up resolving to C minor. Shortly thereafter, however, the I arrives and the cadenza begins and everything continues on as normal.

III. Allegro ma non troppo

writes that the gait of this finale is "neither that of a gallop, nor of a race, nor even of a dance, but just of a swinging walk, swift and regular, and the virtue of its refrain, with its sketchy outline and its 'sillabato' diction... rests in its rhythm rather than in its melody." Further, he notes that while this rondo can be divided into contrasting sections, the appearance on the page is very different from what falls on the ear, which is almost monothematic: "When, score in hand, one notes each return of the first subject... it is possible to pick out the four expositions of the [rondo] refrain and the three couplets... but on hearing it one's impression is that the refrain never leaves the stage."

References

Sources

References

1. Keefe, Simon P.. (2001). "'An Entirely Special Manner': Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 14 in E Flat, K.449, and the Stylistic Implications of Confrontation". Music & Letters.
2. [[Cliff Eisen]]. (October 2010). "Piano Concertos Nos. 12, 13 and 14 (version for piano and string quartet)". [[Naxos Records]].
3. Zaslaw, Neal. (1996). "Mozart's piano concertos: text, context, interpretation". The University of Michigan Press.