The audiences all over Europe who had been dazzled by young Mozart, a child prodigy the likes of which the world had never seen, would have been shocked to see where he landed in his early twenties: living at home in Salzburg, working a dead-end church job alongside his impossible-to-please father, and grasping at any chance to get out. He passed the time by scrounging up local gigs entertaining rich patrons, which at least gave him opportunities to practice writing symphonies and concertos. It wasn’t until he was 25 that it all paid off, when he moved to Vienna to take a chance as a freelancer.

The Piano Concerto in E-flat Major that Mozart wrote around the time of his 21st birthday represented one of his (failed) efforts to launch. He composed it for the amateur pianist Victoire Jenamy, who had passed through Salzburg that winter on her way to Paris to see her father—who happened to be the ballet master of the Paris Opera. Mozart went to Paris the next year on a job-hunting expedition, and he probably delivered the concerto himself when he paid a call to the well-connected family. Not only did Mozart come home without a job to show for it, but he tragically returned without his mother, who had accompanied him and succumbed to an illness during their travels.

This concerto, widely known as “Jeunehomme,” has suffered from a glaring musicological mistake for the past century. Mozart referred to the concerto as the “jenomy” [sic] in a letter to his father, and two French biographers assumed that Mozart had bastardized a proper French name. In their 1912 volume, they supplied the name “Jeunehomme”—French for “young man”—which must have seemed close enough to “Jenomy,” besides being a lovely nickname for a work indeed written by a young man. Scholars long assumed that this mystery pianist named Jeunehomme had vanished from the record, until the historian Michael Lorenz rediscovered the connection to the actual Madame Jenamy and her father. 

In the first movement, the piano’s surprising entrance after just one measure of lead-in from the orchestra creates an intimate, conversational quality. The Andantino, Mozart’s first concerto movement in a minor key, throbs with dark, muted textures and beautifully forlorn melodies, gilded with decoration befitting an operatic soprano. The Presto finale, with its detour to a minuet (the quintessential French dance), is unusually substantial and affecting for a movement that by tradition was little more than an energetic closing flourish.