Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart settled in Vienna in 1781 as a “freelance artist”, having broken with his engagement as court organist in the chapel of Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg. His desire to establish a name for himself in this city of music as a composer and pianist was the impetus for writing 15 of his piano concertos. As he would share with his father Leopold, “Vienna is the city of the fortepiano”. Indeed, at that time, nowhere else in Europe was so much piano music being composed, published and performed, nor were there so many master pianists and wonderful instruments. Mozart began to organise ‘academies’ – public concerts in which he played, conducted and performed his own works. Again, in a letter to Leopold, he described his life as an independent musician: ‘If you may excuse me for writing to you so little, I have absolutely no time, as I have three concerts coming up for which there are already 100 subscribers… You can easily imagine that I will have to play new things, so I must write them down. The mornings are dedicated to the students and I play almost every evening.”
In 1786, now in his thirties, Wolfgang wrote the three concertos he mentioned, planned for performance during Lent. Among them was the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, KV 488, one of Mozart’s most popular and beautiful concertos. It was completed on March 2nd , the opera The Marriage of Figaro in progress at the same time. Contrary to the legend that Amadeus always wrote quickly, on the fly, there are preliminary sketches of musical ideas for this opus that date back to 1784. Clearly he needed them to mature and ‘ripen’.
The exact date of the concert premiere is unknown. It is certain that Mozart was its first performer. He intended to distribute it together with the other two concertos (KV 451 and 459) outside Vienna. He sold copies of the three concertos, ‘kept for his own use or for a small circle of amateurs and connoisseurs’, to family friend and patron Prince Joseph Maria Benedikt von Fürstenberg, the reigning ruler of Donauchingen (still an important centre for the promotion of new music), on the express condition that the works should not pass into the hands of others.
The Concerto in A Major is one of Mozart’s most intimate and expressive works. It is here that for the first time he replaced the customary oboes with clarinets, excluding trumpets and timpani. Compared to the other piano concertos, KV 488 is darker and softer in tone. The clarinet is a relatively new instrument, which had fascinated Wolfgang years before when he visited Mainheim. “Wow, if only we in Salzburg could have clarinets in the orchestra too,” he would wistfully write to his father. In Vienna his dream came true, he would write both the Clarinet Concerto and the Clarinet Wind Quintet.
The concerto is in the traditional three parts: fast – slow – fast. Already in the first movement Amadeus presented a double exposition of the lovely themes he developed in an elegant interaction between piano and orchestra. The virtuoso solo cadenza before the reprise is the only surviving one he fixed in score and reflects his creative invention. He usually improvised the cadenzas brilliantly, rarely writing them out separately (to be performed primarily by his students).
The second movement has a special place in Mozart’s oeuvre; it is the iconic movement of the concerto. It is the only Adagio that the composer wrote in the then rarely used key of F sharp minor. This deeply confessional and melancholic music set to the rhythm of the Siciliana seems to be a passionate outpouring of Mozart’s inner self. The cheerful final rondo brings a stark contrast to the preceding movement and, despite the surprising shadowy tonal modulations, brings us closer to the witty and hilarious images of his comic operas.