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

Program notes

About the Work

Mozart completed this concerto on 24 March 1786 and is thought to have played it for the first time about two weeks later, most probably on 7 April, at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Almost nothing is known about the concert. He was at the time finishing The Marriage of Figaro, which stands next to the concerto in the Köchel catalogue as K. 492, and it would be hard to find two works written side by side that are less alike.

Mozart wrote only two piano concertos in a minor key, No. 20 in D minor and this one. The C minor is the darker and the stranger of the two. It also calls for the largest orchestra of any of his concertos: flute, pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, timpani and strings. Oboes and clarinets together were a luxury he hardly ever allowed himself in a concerto, and he uses them. Again and again the woodwind take over the argument as a group, and the piano converses with them as much as with the strings.

The manuscript, which is now in the Royal College of Music in London, shows a composer working fast and under pressure. Mozart’s handwriting is usually tidy. Here there are crossings-out, second thoughts and passages squeezed in wherever there was room, and the solo part is in places only sketched: he was going to play it himself and did not need to write everything down.

The opening theme is one of the most remarkable he wrote. It begins quietly, in bare octaves, in a three-in-a-bar metre that is unusual for the first movement of a Mozart concerto, and within its first thirteen bars it touches all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Its wide, angular leaps colour everything that follows.

Later composers heard what was in it. Beethoven, who knew the concerto well, is reported to have said to his friend Cramer after hearing it: “Ah, we shall never be able to do anything like that!” His own Third Piano Concerto, also in C minor, likewise begins in unison, and Brahms was another admirer.

The soloist in these concerts is Yefim Bronfman, with Tugan Sokhiev conducting.

What to Listen For

Allegro. The orchestra gives out the main theme softly and in unison. When the piano enters it does not take up that theme at all. It begins with a plaintive idea of its own, and throughout the movement the soloist approaches the main theme only indirectly, leaving its plain statement to the orchestra. Notice how often the woodwind play as a choir of their own. The piano’s whirling passage-work continues into the coda.

Larghetto. The key turns to E-flat major and the piano alone plays a melody of extreme simplicity, which the orchestra repeats. Between its returns come two episodes led by the woodwind, the first in the minor, which the piano then decorates.

Allegretto. No cheerful rondo here, but a theme with variations, back in C minor. The theme has the tread of a march. Two variations offer relief, one in A-flat major that brings an abrupt change of mood and a later one in C major, but the minor returns each time. For the last variation Mozart changes the metre to a lilting six-eight, and the concerto ends, as it began, in the minor.