Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)
Allegro
[Larghetto]
[Allegretto]
This concerto’s nickname is a sure sign of its one-time popularity. Until the middle of last century, it was one of the most played of Mozart’s piano concertos, but the re-evaluation of all his concertos since then has led many musicians and scholars to disparage it.
It presents no problems to the listener, but is nevertheless a problematical work. In the first place, its nickname may be misapplied. Mozart did indeed attend the coronation of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor at Frankfurt am Main, though he wasn’t on the ‘official’ program. He gave an Academy (concert) of his own there, on 15 October 1790, at which he may have played this concerto, or the F major Concerto K.459, or both. Certainly he had already played this D major work at the Saxon Court in Dresden on 14 April 1789, which may have been the premiere, though the work was completed in Vienna on 24 February 1788, and the haste evident in the manuscript suggests a performance deadline.
Haste left the manuscript incomplete, missing the left hand of large portions of the outer movements, and of the whole of the slow movement. The left hand part may be the work of Johann André, who published the first edition. It lacks the inventiveness Mozart would surely have brought to it.
What has puzzled many about this concerto is its tone. It is written on a large scale – indeed the first movement is only exceeded in length, in all Mozart’s works, by that of the previous concerto, the C major, K.503. The piano part has considerable virtuosity, and the music is often showily brilliant, abetted by the bright key of D major. But by comparison with Mozart’s wonderful series of concertos leading up to this one, there is a surprising lack of interplay between soloist and orchestra. The wind and brass parts often seem like afterthoughts, not involved in the presentation of the main theme, and there is some evidence that they were intended to be optional. So rather than the subtle, spirited, expressive conversation of many other Mozart piano concertos, we have, as Friedrich Blume has written, ‘a loose scattered abundance of ideas and associations instead of stern constructional logic’.
The case for the prosecution suggests that Mozart, disappointed with the falling support for his concerts, made a deliberate attempt in this concerto to court popularity. Cuthbert Girdlestone regards the Coronation Concerto as a manifestation of the galant taste of the time – the kind of music written by Mozart’s successful rivals. He calls it one of Mozart’s poorest and emptiest concertos, spacious on the outside, empty inside. But the defence is winning: this concerto is being increasingly seen as a sign of a new voice in the music of Mozart’s later years. Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style, views the Coronation Concerto as historically the most ‘progressive’ of all Mozart’s works ‘the closest to the early or proto-Romantic style of Hummel and Weber’. Its style of virtuosity, he suggests, is closest to the early concertos of Beethoven.
According to this view, Mozart here has shifted the balance – instead of sharp and dramatic contrasts, and intricate argument, he makes the structure depend on the succession of melodies, and separates them with transitional passages, unrelated to the themes, which ‘beautifully make us wait for a melody to begin’. No doubt it was the uncluttered presentation of the themes which made this concerto a favourite. Fellow-composer Dittersdorf, who complained that Mozart presents so many themes ‘that in the end it is impossible to retain all these beautiful melodies’, must have found this concerto easier to grasp. But rather than a retreat from musical adventurousness into an accessible, ‘society’ manner, this style of Mozart’s can be seen as a new way of presenting the virtuosity which is of the essence of the concerto genre. The solo part can spread itself luxuriantly in the passage-work, when it is not participating in the simple presentation of the themes. This leads to Rosen to suggest that Mozart’s Coronation Concerto is ‘the concerto that Hummel would have written if he had had not only remarkable talent but genius’(young Hummel was Mozart’s live-in pupil in 1786-88).
Mozart’s scheme in this concerto is obvious, and needs little descriptive commentary. The flashes of expressive and colouristic intensity stand out as purple patches, as he clearly intended: in the first movement the sighing appoggiaturas of the second subject, and the chromatic passage in the subject reserved for the soloist. The ‘development’ takes up a scrap from the end of the exposition and throws it to the soloist in an improvisatory way, with interjections from the orchestra. In the recapitulation, just after the second subject, the emotional temperature suddenly rises in an intense passage in G minor, but the music just as quickly resumes its equable course. Mozart left no cadenzas for this concerto.
The second movement, in three-part song form, has been described by Blume as ‘the simplest and most subtle of all slow movements in Mozart’s piano concertos’. The simplicity of the solo part seems to call out for the elaboration by improvised ornamentation that Mozart would have given it. It is so simple, as Rosen observes, that ‘if it were not a masterpiece, it would be merely pretty’. The finale is unusual among Mozart’s rondos in that its second episode begins with the same material as the first. It ends with a delightful passage, all the more striking for being one of the few in this concerto where winds, strings, and soloist work together in counterpoint.
In the Coronation Concerto, by shifting his musical language from discourse towards display, Mozart has provided an opportunity for soloists who are not literal-minded to fill out his ideas with fantasy, and even notes of their own. How it can be done with Mozartian imagination is wonderfully demonstrated in Wanda Landowska’s 1937 recording.
First published for Symphony Australia, 2003