Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491

Introduction

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.

Music

The concerto is divided into the following three movements:

The concerto is scored for one flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. This is the largest array of instruments for which Mozart composed any of his concertos.

It is one of only two of Mozart's piano concertos that are scored for both oboes and clarinets (the other, his concerto for two pianos, has clarinets only in the revised version). The clarinet was not at the time a conventional orchestral instrument. Robert D. Levin writes: "The richness of wind sonority, due to the inclusion of oboes and clarinets, is the central timbral characteristic of [the concerto]: time and again in all three movements the winds push the strings completely to the side."

The solo instrument for the concerto is scored as a "cembalo". This term often denotes a harpsichord, but in this concerto, Mozart used it as a generic term that encompassed the fortepiano, an eighteenth-century version of the modern piano that among other things was more dynamically capable than the harpsichord.