1
‘An Entirely Special Manner’:
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 in E b , K. 449, and the Stylistic Implications of Confrontation
A
HIGHPOINT in Mozart’s career as a composer-performer in Vienna came rduring the spring of 1784. In a letter to his father Leopold, dated 4 March 1784, Mozart listed an astonishing 22 engagements for the period 26 February to 3 April, including three concerts in a subscription series at the Trattnerhof, two at the Burgtheater (one of which was subsequently cancelled) and several at the salons of Prince Galitsin and Count Esterházy.1 According to Mozart, the Trattnerhof and Burgtheater performances were particularly well received: he‘won extraordinary applause’, had a hall that was ‘full to overflowing’ and was praised repeatedly for the first subscription concert on 17 March. He described the Burgtheater concert – for which he performed the Piano Concertos Nos. 15 and 16 in Bband D, K. 450 and 451 and the Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452 – as ‘most successful’ and remarked that it was ‘greatly to my credit that my listeners never got tired’.2Even if Mozart can hardly be relied upon as an impartial witness to his own success, his list of subscribers to the Trattnerhof series, containing 176 names (‘thirty more than Richter and Fischer together’), many from the highest artistic, intellectual, cultural and aristocratic echelons of society,3testifies to the high regard in which he was held. The Wunderkind who had charmed the Vien-nese in his youth had become a fully endorsed member of the VienVien-nese musical establishment.
The foundation for Mozart’s considerable successes in early 1784 was laid by the three piano concertos composed for the aforementioned Trattnerhof and Burgtheater concerts, K. 449 in Eb, K. 450 in Bb, and K. 451 in D (Nos. 14–16), as well as by K. 453 in G (No. 17), performed by Mozart at a subsequent concert at the Burgtheater on 29 April.4Sending these works to his father on 15 May 1784,
1 See Anderson, ed. and trans., Letters, pp. 869–70.
2 Ibid., pp. 872, 873.
3 Mozart gives a complete list of his subscribers for these concerts, boasting of his greater popularity than Richter and Fischer, in a letter to his father on 20 March 1784. See Ibid., pp. 870–72.
4 The concertos K. 449, 450, 451, 453 were entered into Mozart’s thematic catalogue, the Verzeichnüss, on 9 February, 15 March, 22 March, 12 April respectively.
Mozart distinguished K. 449 from the later three concertos on the grounds that it was scored for a smaller accompanying orchestra:
I regard them both [K. 450 and K. 451] as concertos which are bound to make the performer perspire. From the point of view of difficulty the Bbconcerto beats the one in D. Well, I am very curious to hear which of the three in Bb, D and G you and my sister prefer. The one in Ebdoes not belong at all to the same category. It is a concerto of an entirely special manner, composed rather for a small orchestra than for a large one. So it is really a question of the three grand concertos.5
Two weeks earlier, Mozart had even suggested that K. 449 – like his first set of Viennese Piano Concertos from 1782–83, K. 413 in F, K. 414 in A and K. 415 in C – ‘can be performed a quattro without wind instruments’ in contrast to his self-professed ‘grand’ concertos, all three of which ‘have wind-instrument accom-paniment’.6
The newly intricate and sophisticated writing for woodwind in K. 450, 451 and 453 – indeed the prominent role given to the orchestra in these works generally – has elicited much critical comment from the late eighteenth century onwards. A reviewer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in October 1799, for example, comments very favourably on K. 450’s accompanimental writing, and particu-larly on the ornate nature of several of its wind passages:
it is not as well-crafted as some better known and newer concertos by the same composer: on the other hand, though, its delicateness accounts for a great deal lighter and more suitable instrumental accompaniment, more practical on the whole than some of the others. It is certainly easier to find ten pianists who completely perfect even the most difficult of these concertos, before one finds a single good accompanying orchestra. But in the last Allegro of the concerto in ques-tion there are also some short passages in the first oboe which, if they are to be performed well, in style and with precision, require just as much practice and assur-ance as any passage in the concerto part.7
5 Wilhelm A. Bauer, Otto Erich Deutsch and J.H. Eibl, eds., Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen.
Gesamtausgabe. Band III: 1780–86 (Kassel and London: Bärenreiter, 1963), p. 315. Translation adapted slightly from Anderson, Letters, p. 877. Mozart’s representation of K. 449 as a ‘ganz besonderer Art’ is better rendered ‘an entirely special manner’ than Anderson’s ‘a quite peculiar kind’. Although Mozart’s stylistic pronouncement about K. 449 is unique in his correspondence (to my knowledge), it is intriguingly similar to Haydn’s famous remarks from letters in 1781 about his Op. 33 set of string quartets constituting ‘an entirely new and special manner’ (‘eine gantz neue besondere Art’). For Haydn’s comments, see Dénes Bartha, ed., Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichungen (Kassel and London: Bärenreiter, 1965), pp. 106–107.
6 Anderson, Letters, p. 877. For Mozart’s reference to the a quattro performance of K. 413, 414 and 415 see his ‘musical announcement’ in the Wiener Zeitung of 15 January 1783, reprinted in Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, p. 212. As Neal Zaslaw pointed out, Mozart’s a quattro reference in all likelihood designated performance in four parts and not necessarily by four instruments with one to each part. See ‘Contexts for Mozart’s Piano Concertos’, in Mozart’s Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Zaslaw (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 7–16, at p. 10.
7 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 2 (1799–1800), cols. 12–13. ‘Zwar ist es nicht so sehr gearbeitet,
In similar fashion, a reviewer for the Musikalische Korrespondenz der teutschen Filarmonischen Gesellschaft remarks in 1792 on the ‘scoring and obbligato writing’
that require K. 451 to be performed ‘by large, fully-manned orchestras’, identi-fying this concerto as ‘among the most beautiful and brilliant that we have from this master, with respect to both the ritornellos and the solos’.8
Twentieth-century writers have followed the lead of their late eighteenth-century counterparts, readily acknowledging the originality and ‘brilliance’ of the orchestral writing in K. 450, 451 and 453. Numerous critics explain the stylistic significance of K. 450 in Mozart’s oeuvre in terms of the originality of its wind writing, several drawing special attention to the interweaving of the wood-winds and the strings in the opening bars of the first movement. For Charles Rosen, K. 450, ‘the first [Mozart concerto] to employ the winds with a complete sense of their color and their dramatic possibilities’, uses the woodwinds to
‘boldly open the concerto on their own, as if to proclaim the new venture from the beginning’.9In like-minded fashion, Leonard Ratner clarifies that ‘The new role of the winds was initiated precisely at the opening of the Bb major Concerto, K. 450 . . . From this time, the winds become prominent in the concertos’,10and Irving R. Eisley explains that Mozart’s ‘concertato’ orchestra, in which the
als manche bereits bekanntern und neuern Konzerte desselben Verfassers: dahingegen aber sowohl wegen der schwächern als ungleich leichtern und bequemeren Instrumentalbegleitung im Allgemeinen brauchbarer als manches von diesen. Sicher findet man eher zehn Klavierspieler, die, selbst die schwersten dieser Konzerte ganz fertig durcharbeiten, ehe man ein einziges Orchester zum guten Akkompagnement dazu auftreibt. Doch sind auch in dem letzten Allegro des vor uns liegenden Konzerts in der ersten Hoboe einige Kleinigkeiten, die, wenn sie gut und in Ansehung der Manieren bestimmt und deutlich herausgebracht werden sollen, vielleicht eben so viele Uebung und Gewissheit erfordern, als irgend eine Stelle in der Konzertstimme.’
8 Quoted in translation in Cliff Eisen, New Mozart Documents, p. 124. Other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century critics identifying active participation by the orchestra in Mozart’s piano concertos do not mention specific works. Citing Mozart’s concertos as his model, Heinrich Christoph Koch explains that in ‘a well-worked out concerto . . . the accompanying voices are not merely there to sound this or that missing interval of the chord’ but rather to engage in a
‘passionate dialogue’ with the soloist. See Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt, 1802; reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), col. 854; translation from Nancy Kovaleff Baker’s edition of Koch’s earlier treatise – Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (1783–92) – in which the same remarks were made, Introductory Essay on Composition: the Mechanical Rules of Melody, Sections 3 and 4 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 209. August Frederick Christo-pher Kollmann states that ‘The best specimens of good modern Concertos for the Piano-Forte, are those by Mozart, in which every part of the accompaniments is interesting, without obscuring the principal part’, in An Essay on Practical Musical Composition (London, 1799; reprint New York:
Da Capo, 1973), p. 15. And a writer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung pointed out that Mozart thoroughly worked all instruments in the accompanying orchestra, allowing the soloist to be only the ‘most striking [hervorstechendsten]’ among all the performers, in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 3 (1800–01), cols. 25–35, 51–54, at col. 28. For a study of Koch’s remarks, see Simon P. Keefe, Mozart’s Piano Concertos: Dramatic Dialogue in the Age of Enlightenment (Wood-bridge and Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2001), pp. 9–23.
9 See Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (London: Norton, 1971), p. 220.
10 See Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (London and New York:
Schirmer, 1980), p. 297.
woodwinds assume an equal or higher position than the strings in the orchestral pecking order, ‘appears abruptly, with little or no hint to be found in the earlier concertos, in the Bbconcerto’.11K. 451 is praised most often for its symphonic quality, through which the orchestra is ‘liberated’.12Cuthbert Girdlestone and Arthur Hutchings rank the involvement of the orchestra in K. 451 especially highly, remarking respectively that it ‘contains the most splendid instances in all Mozart of interplay between the protagonists’ and the clearest examples of ‘the solo [speaking] . . . both through and with its newly augmented orchestra’.13 Recent critics find K. 453 ‘even more elaborate’ in its use of woodwinds than K.
450 and K. 451, demonstrating ‘a finer integration of soloist and orchestra [than K. 450 and 451], approaching a chamber music style, particularly in the blending of woodwinds and piano and in the sharing of thematic material’.14
Just as Mozart distinguished the Ebconcerto, K. 449, from K. 450, 451 and 453 on orchestration and performance grounds, so twentieth-century critics distance K. 449 from its immediate successors according to criteria of orchestration and affect. Many remark on the absence of refined and prominent writing for the woodwind in K. 449;15whilst K. 450 and 451 could be described as either ‘piano concertos with obbligato orchestra or symphonies with obbligato piano solo’ the same could not be said of K. 449.16Others observe striking affective dissimilarities between K. 449 and K. 450, 451, 453, finding K. 449 ‘quite unlike the gay, elegant Mozart of 450 and 453’ and ‘of [a] very different character’ and less urbane manner than K. 450.17In addition, K. 450 and 451 are described as ‘twins’ in which ‘Mozart returns to more familiar paths’ than in K. 449.18In fact, the unique qualities of K. 449 have not passed unnoticed. For Girdlestone, the concerto is
‘something exceptional’, on account of its first movement ‘born of an unstable, restless mood, sometimes petulant and irascible’.19He even goes so far as to state:
‘In reality, it is isolated in Mozart’s work; its first and last movements fall in with
11 Irving R. Eisley, ‘Mozart’s Concertato Orchestra’, Mozart-Jahrbuch 1976/7, p. 9.
12 Denis Forman, Mozart’s Concerto Form: The First Movements of the Piano Concertos (London:
Praeger, 1971), p. 184.
13 Cuthbert M. Girdlestone, Mozart’s Piano Concertos (London: Cassell, 1948), p. 213 (first published in French in 1939 as W. A. Mozart et ses concertos pour piano); Arthur Hutchings, A Companion to Mozart’s Piano Concertos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948; eighth corrected impression reissued 1998), p. 100.
14 Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Mozart (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 105; Mario Mercado, The Evolution of Mozart’s Pianistic Style (Carbondale, Illinois: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1992), p. 84.
15 See, for example, H.C. Robbins Landon, ‘The Concertos: (2) Their Musical Origin and Develop-ment’, The Mozart Companion, ed. Landon and Donald Mitchell (London: Norton, 1956), p. 261;
Sadie, New Grove Mozart, p. 104; Mercado, Mozart’s Pianistic Style, p. 82.
16 Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, his Work, trans. Arthur Mendel and Nathan Broder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 302.
17 See Forman, Mozart’s Concerto Form, p. 175, and Philip Radcliffe, Mozart’s Piano Concertos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), p. 33.
18 Einstein, Mozart, p. 302.
19 Girdlestone, Mozart and his Concertos, p. 178.
no group of his compositions and do not bear clearly the mark of any period in his life.’20 Einstein agrees, arguing that the first movement is extraordinary on account of ‘[voicing] an unrest that never tires of introducing contrasting themes’
and that, as a whole, ‘Mozart never wrote another concerto like it, either before or afterwards’.21
As a result of its common perception as unique, K. 449 has a somewhat uncer-tain stylistic position in the secondary literature among Mozart’s piano concertos.
For the most part it is credited as the first of Mozart’s genuinely mature works in the genre, constituting the initial concerto in an uninterrupted two-year stream of eleven masterpieces (K. 449–491, spring 1784 – spring 1786).22 There are dissenting voices, however. Forman, for example, regards K. 450 as the first mature concerto on account of ‘notable advances’ such as the woodwind writing, the varied repetition of certain phrases and the easy-going self-confidence of the piano in a variety of different moods.23In contrast to Forman, Girdlestone and Hutchings actually consider K. 449 a more forward-looking work than K. 450. For Girdlestone, ‘on the whole . . . K. 449 is in advance of its successor, not only in the depth of its emotional life but also in its symphonic development’.24Equally, Hutchings points out both that K. 450 ‘reverts to an older style than the operatic K. 449’ and that ‘the strings in the E flat work are used as never before in a concerto – far more passionately and colourfully than in [K. 450]’.25Others find K. 449 something of an anomaly, in general stylistic terms. Rosen explains that
‘The series of six [concertos from 1784] . . . begins apparently somewhat timidly with the Concerto in E flat major’ but that ‘in spite of its modest appearance, K.
449 is a bold, even revolutionary concerto’.26Eric Blom finds a basic contradic-tion between the first movement’s tempo/character marking and the overall mood it conveys: ‘Although . . . [it] is marked allegretto vivace, it never shows the least vivacity of spirit.’27In addition, Philip Radcliffe alludes to the concerto’s peculiar qualities when he writes of the work’s ‘curious inner intensity’, of the
‘curious coincidence’ whereby the opening theme of the first movement is a melodic inversion of the corresponding theme in K. 491, and of the ‘mysterious chromatic passage’ in the piano that immediately precedes the recapitulation of the first movement.28
In fact, it is no surprise that critical consensus gives way both to critical
20 Ibid., p. 191.
21 Einstein, Mozart, pp. 302, 301.
22 Girdlestone, Mozart and his Concertos, p. 191; Einstein, Mozart, pp. 300–301; Sadie, New Grove Mozart, p. 104; Mercado, Mozart’s Pianistic Style, p. 82.
23 Forman, Mozart’s Concerto Form, p. 176.
24 Girdlestone, Mozart and his Concertos, p. 210.
25 Hutchings, Mozart’s Piano Concertos, p. 90.
26 See Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 219.
27 Eric Blom, Mozart (London, 1935; first Collier Books edition, 1962, second printing, 1966), p.
199.
28 Radcliffe, Mozart Piano Concertos, p. 30.
disparity and to intimations of anomalous status where K. 449 is concerned. For no other Mozart piano concerto – perhaps no other work in Mozart’s entire instrumental oeuvre – can boast quite as many compositional, stylistic and chronological idiosyncrasies as K. 449. Although (as explained below) K. 449 was written for the most part in spring 1784, Mozart actually began the first move-ment two years earlier, concurrent with his first set of Viennese piano concertos, K. 413–415. As a result, the majority of K. 449, scored for a small complement of wind instruments (2 oboes, 2 horns), was composed at a time when a larger complement (flute, 2 oboes, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets in K. 451 and flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns in K. 453, for example) was establishing itself as Mozart’s norm; K. 449 appears, therefore, at the precise nexus between the a quattro tradition of K. 413–415 and the ‘grand concerto’ tradition from K. 450 onwards. In addition, Mozart did not himself distinguish any single instrumental work from its immediate successors in as clear and direct a fashion as he distin-guished K. 449 from K. 450, 451 and 453. If K. 449 rests intriguingly between two of Mozart’s stylistic practices, it also initiates another important venture in his life, the cataloguing of his works. For K. 449 is Mozart’s first entry into his famous thematic catalogue, the Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke, on 9 February 1784.29In addition to general stylistic and chronological peculiarities, specific musical features of the first movement are also remarkable. Proportionally speaking, the orchestral exposition (or opening ritornello) of K. 449 is longer than the corre-sponding section of any other piano concerto.30Moreover, the orchestra in this section introduces the theme that becomes the ‘secondary’ theme in the solo exposition, in the dominant rather than the tonic, the only such occasion in Mozart’s piano concerto first movements. At the other extreme of the first move-ment, K. 449 contains the only instance of a final cadential trill in the piano imme-diately preceding the cadenza that does not confirm the tonic key, inflecting instead to the relative minor.
The unusual circumstances surrounding the composition of K. 449, the unique nature of Mozart’s pronouncement, the fascinating chronological and stylistic position of the work in Mozart’s oeuvre, and the originality of various features of the music itself suggest that a more detailed and systematic examination of K.
449’s stylistic position among Mozart’s piano concertos will greatly enhance our understanding of the considerable significance of the work in his compositional output. As we shall see, characterizations of K. 449 as sui generis – ‘an entirely special manner’ in Mozart’s own words – as a climactic work in Mozart’s initial
29 Daniel N. Leeson and David Whitwell posit that Mozart began his catalogue in early November 1784, rather than in February, entering the first nine items retrospectively. Although they suggest that the dates entered for the Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452 and the Piano Concerto No. 18 in Bb, K. 456 postdate the actual completion of these works, they conclude that 9 February 1784 is accurate for K. 449. See ‘Mozart’s Thematic Catalogue’, The Musical Times, 114 (August 1973), pp. 781–83.
30 Robert D. Levin, Who Wrote the Mozart Four-Wind Concertante? (Stuyvesant, New York:
Pendragon, 1988), p. 336.
sequence of Viennese piano concertos, and as a work of central importance to Mozart’s subsequent stylistic development (in the concerto and elsewhere) are not mutually exclusive but rather bring to life the work’s significance in the context of stylistic re-invention. In fact, K. 449’s hybrid qualities are precisely what make it such a significant moment of stylistic re-invention, particularly in regard to confrontations between the piano and the orchestra in the first movement.
K. 449 as a hybrid of Mozart’s 1782–83 and spring 1784 concertos
In his groundbreaking study of the paper types of Mozart’s autograph manu-scripts, Alan Tyson has shown that Mozart began work on the first movement of K. 449 in 1782, alongside his first three Viennese concertos K. 413, 414, 415, composing as far as bar 170 (the beginning of the orchestral tutti immediately following the solo exposition). He then ‘abandoned the score, scribbled in the margins, and sketched an aria on the blank side. Much later – perhaps over a year later, at the beginning of 1784 – he resumed work on the concerto, deleted the aria sketch, and completed the score.’31 K. 449 was not the only Viennese piano concerto Mozart left incomplete for an extended period: three bifolia from the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503 predate the completion of the work (4 December 1786) by nearly two years; the first eight leaves of the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488 probably date back to the 1784–85 season, although the work was entered into the Verzeichnüss on 2 March 1786; and the entire first and second movements of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in Bb, K. 595 almost certainly precede the Verzeichnüss date of 5 January 1791 by around three years.32However, for reasons described above – especially the way in which it straddles the a quattro and ‘grand’ concerto fashions – the status of K. 449 as an temporarily incomplete work has potentially the greatest stylistic significance of all.
In his groundbreaking study of the paper types of Mozart’s autograph manu-scripts, Alan Tyson has shown that Mozart began work on the first movement of K. 449 in 1782, alongside his first three Viennese concertos K. 413, 414, 415, composing as far as bar 170 (the beginning of the orchestral tutti immediately following the solo exposition). He then ‘abandoned the score, scribbled in the margins, and sketched an aria on the blank side. Much later – perhaps over a year later, at the beginning of 1784 – he resumed work on the concerto, deleted the aria sketch, and completed the score.’31 K. 449 was not the only Viennese piano concerto Mozart left incomplete for an extended period: three bifolia from the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503 predate the completion of the work (4 December 1786) by nearly two years; the first eight leaves of the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488 probably date back to the 1784–85 season, although the work was entered into the Verzeichnüss on 2 March 1786; and the entire first and second movements of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in Bb, K. 595 almost certainly precede the Verzeichnüss date of 5 January 1791 by around three years.32However, for reasons described above – especially the way in which it straddles the a quattro and ‘grand’ concerto fashions – the status of K. 449 as an temporarily incomplete work has potentially the greatest stylistic significance of all.