Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 24, K 491

The reception history of Mozart’s piano concertos during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries is rather negative. Concert organisers disregarded them as music for children and they were very rarely performed until Richard Strauss and other early champions of Mozart’s music brought them back to the concert platform. Even in the 18^th century and despite its popularity with the audience, the genre was under fire from a number of theorists such as J. S. Bach’s pupil Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721-1783). The detractors claimed that concertos are devoid of a specific character. They proposed that by putting virtuosity in the foreground, the enjoyment experienced by the performer is not shared with the audience, and as a result the audience is offered “the same non-aesthetic pleasure as watching someone perform an extremely difficult act such as a tightrope walk”.

Mozart’s piano concertos are not devoid of specific characters, that much is certain, and especially with the C minor concerto. Yet one cannot deny that the analogy to the tightrope walk has some truth in it and perhaps ironically the explanation to this had been provided by the genre’s advocate Heinrich Christoph Koch (1749-1816). By attempting to win over the critics, Koch made a comparison of dialogic interaction in concertos with dramatic dialogue in Greek Tragedies, as Ancient Greece was held as all things elegant and virtuous at the time. He said that “by a concerto I imagine something similar to the tragedy of the ancients, where the actor expressed his feelings not towards the pit, but to the chorus”. The danger in such a situation is that the vitality of the exchange can easily be locked between the solo and the orchestra and out of reach of the audience. The discourse of a concerto, unlike that of the symphony or the quartet, depends on constructive but mismatched dialogues between the solo instrument and the orchestra. If one were to gleam an aesthetic pleasure from such a work he would have to actively imagine himself to be in the position of either the solo or the orchestra, for much of this aesthetic pleasure comes from the intricacy of the discourse such as the punctuations of the woodwinds in the 2^nd movement that undermines the thematic structure and subsequently set up the irregular alternations between solo and tutti in the variation movement (3^rd movement).

December 2012