Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Born: January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria
Died: December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria

Concerto No. 17 in G Major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 453

• Composed: 1784
  
• Premiere: June 13, 1784 in Vienna, Barbara Ployer as soloist
  
• Instrumentation: solo piano, flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, strings
• CSO notable performances: First: February 1957, Thor Johnson conducting with pianist Lukas Foss. Most Recent: March 2021, Louis Langrée conducting with pianist Conrad Tao.
• Duration: approx. 30 minutes

From the time that Mozart settled in Vienna in 1781, one of his most important means of financial support was giving piano lessons to some of the city’s better-heeled residents. Although he charged top price for his services, he seldom had trouble filling his teaching schedule which, during his early years in the capital, occupied most of his weekday mornings. That he was also frantically busy during the palmy days of spring 1784 performing and composing (between February and April he played 22 concerts and wrote four piano concertos, a violin sonata and a quintet for piano and winds) says much for his popularity and his ambition; it is little wonder that sickness overtook him by the end of the summer. “Have I not enough to do? I do not think I can get rusty at this rate,” he wrote in a letter to his father, Leopold, with which he also proudly enclosed a list of his performances.

One of Mozart’s favorite and most talented pupils in 1784 was Barbara Ployer, daughter of Gottfried Ignaz von Ployer, the Viennese agent at the Habsburg court (today he would probably be called a lobbyist) for Mozart’s old employer and nemesis, the Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo of Salzburg. Mozart gave Barbara lessons during the winter at the family’s town home in the Lugeck, near St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and in the summer at their villa in the nearby village of Döbling, north of the city, on the way to Grinzing. On February 9, 1784, he finished for her the Concerto in E-flat Major (No. 14, K. 449), which “Fräulein Babette” (as Mozart called her) first played on March 23. This handsome piece was so well received in the Ployer household that Mozart created for it a sequel, the G Major Concerto (K. 453), and presented it to his student/patron just three weeks later, on April 12. (During that amazingly fertile spring season, Mozart wrote two more piano concertos, K. 450 and K. 451, between the works for Babette.) A performance was arranged at the Ployer residence in Döbling for June 13. Mozart took advantage of the occasion to invite the famous composer Giovanni Paisiello, who was passing through Vienna on his way back to Naples after eight years serving as opera composer to the Empress Catherine in St. Petersburg, to accompany him “in order that he might hear my composition and my pupil.” In addition to Babette’s rendition of the new work that evening, Mozart joined his student in the Concerto for Two Pianos (K. 365), and then took part in his recent Quintet for Piano and Winds (K. 452). One wonders if Paisiello’s stronger emotion that night was pleasure or envy. At any rate, Mozart thought highly of the new G major concerto; it was one of only six such works that he published during his lifetime.

The Piano Concerto No. 17 is, in many ways, Mozart’s quintessential example of the genre. It is brimming with excellent melodies, touched by both pathos and wit, masterful of form, brilliant in sonority and always in the most exquisite, refined taste. In his survey of the concerto literature, Abraham Veinus perceptively noted one of the essential qualities of Mozart’s genius, a characteristic seen nowhere better than in this Concerto: “He was a blender of moods, a man who worked with the entire gamut of human emotions. Even within a single movement his range is as extensive as it is subtle. Whatever the main character of the movement, there are always qualifying touches. It is in the continual chiaroscuro of lighter and darker emotions that one finds the richest satisfaction.” Musicologist Alfred Einstein called this Concerto a work of “hidden laughter and hidden sadness.”

The Concerto begins with the best of good cheer. The movement’s main theme is one of those peerless Mozartian mixes of march, song and symphony, bursting with the beautiful melodic kernels that incited his contemporaries to jealousy over his lyrical gifts. The violins present a complementary motive, a close-interval phrase that finds an echo in the soulful theme that opens the Andante. After its entry, the piano usurps and elaborates both themes and adds a new one of its own between them in an unaccompanied passage. The soloist pauses while a vigorous tutti leads to the stronger sentiments of the development section, largely based on a little arpeggiated motive previously introduced in the orchestral introduction. The recapitulation returns the earlier material and allows for a solo cadenza, for which Mozart left not one but two notated realizations.

The Andante is one of those wondrous, formally unclassifiable slow movements that abound in the piano concertos. It opens with what English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey called “a solemn, pleading phrase” in the violins and a limpid melody shared among the woodwinds. The piano enters, ponders some of the material already presented, and then undertakes a thoughtful dialogue with the members of the orchestra for the remainder of the movement. Such thorough, symphonic integration of soloist and ensemble was one of Mozart’s greatest contributions to the concerto form.

A bit of Mozartian biography attached to the finale is as charming as the movement’s infectious main theme. On May 27, 1784, Mozart recorded in his account book the expenditure of 34 kreuzer for a starling at a Viennese pet shop. The bird, according to the delighted composer’s testimony, was able to whistle all the notes of the first five measures of the finale’s melody except one, which it overshot by about a half-step. “That was beautiful,” Mozart told his diary, and then copied down the starling’s version of the tune, noting the single “mistake.” Mozart grew fond of the bird. He liked its cheerful company and was amused to show it off to visitors. When it died three years later, he buried it in his backyard with a tiny funeral ceremony and a few lines of elegiac doggerel: “A little fool lies here, Whom I held dear...” It is a delightful story, of course, though Mozart never explained how the bird came to learn his theme even before it had been played by human musicians—the starling must have been a veritable Jenny Lind among fauna. The avian connection for this music is certainly not inappropriate, however, since it is decidedly in the opera buffa idiom from which arose seven years later that most memorable birdman in all of opera, Papageno in The Magic Flute. Formally, the finale is a crystalline set of variations that concludes with a dashing coda in quicker tempo, exactly the technique that Mozart used to round off the acts of his operatic masterpieces.

—Richard E. Rodda