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Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453 Allegro |
Composed: Estimated length: |
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Born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austrian Empire; Died on December 5, 1791 |
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First performance: During the mid or late spring of 1784 in Vienna. |
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First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work. |
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The Piano Concerto in G major dates from April 1784, a vintage year of Mozart’s concerto writing. The artist had made himself a Vienna celebrity through performances of his own keyboard concertos, which were tailor-made to show off his mesmerizing style as a performer. Each of Mozart’s concertos has a unique aura, while at the same time they share compositional strategies and family resemblances.
There is some dispute as to when the premiere of K. 453, a work notable for its refined intimacy, took place. We do know that the G major Concerto was used to show off the talent of Mozart’s student Barbara (“Babette”) Ployer (1765-1811), the niece of a Salzburg court official. Ployer was active as both a pianist and a composer, and her artistry particularly impressed Mozart. We even have a sketch he made of his student in the margin of one of his scores.
The historical record confirms that Ployer gave a performance of the G major Concerto in Vienna in June 1784 (a few months after the piece was composed). Mozart in fact joined her at this event to play his Sonata for Two Pianos, K. 448, and made his pride in her accomplishments clear. Ployer’s repertoire also included the E-flat major Concerto, K. 449, which Mozart had written earlier that year (one of a string of piano concertos produced almost back-to-back). Whether Mozart himself gave the very first performance of the G major Concerto earlier that spring is not known conclusively but is a possibility.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
The opening Allegro soon expands beyond the convention of an upbeat march and introduces subtler, more nuanced gestures. Mozart wrote out the cadenza for this movement. The first two movements in general can be compared to painterly techniques of balancing light and shade. But Mozart’s poetic vocabulary encompasses subtle wit as well (even if it’s of a sort "different" from that of his older friend Haydn).
In the Andante, prayer-like lyricism and unexpected fluctuations of harmony produce some of the most transportive moments in all Mozart. “If I absolutely had to name my all-time favorite piece of music, I think I would vote for the Andante,” Leonard Bernstein once remarked in a televised lecture-concert, adding that it shows Mozart “at the peak of his lyrical powers, combining serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity in one great lyric improvisation.”
The Andante’s mood of introspection is balanced out by the sunlit spirit of the finale: its theme, the source of five variations, anticipates the chirpy charm of Papageno from The Magic Flute. The tune also has another famous avian association; Mozart recorded that his pet starling could whistle it back to him (even adding a few little variants of its own). Bernstein lauded this finale as “a perfect product of the age of reason—witty, objective, graceful, delicious.” To this abundance, Mozart appends a sparklingly inventive and extended presto coda, in which the opening tune at last intervenes—as if in the perfectly timed denouement of a wordless comic opera.
In addition to solo piano, scored for flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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