Mozart / Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major, K. 449 (Anda)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major, K. 449 (1784)

00:00 - Allegro vivace (Cadenza: Mozart)
08:32 - Andantino
15:08 - Allegro ma non troppo

Géza Anda (Pianist & Conductor) performs with the Camerata Salzburg (Camerata Academica des Salzburger Mozarteums).

"On 9 February 1784, Mozart began to enter in a little notebook of forty-four leaves—perhaps a bit too large to have served as a pocket notebook—all his works as he completed them, giving in each case the date, the type, and the beginning of the work written on two staves. He kept up this book until a few weeks before his death, filling fifty‐eight pages. The first work he listed is a Concerto for piano in E-flat major (K. 449), with accompaniment for strings, and oboes and horns ad libitum. The fact that the participation of the winds is made optional seems to connect this Concerto with the three written in 1782-3; but the connection is only apparent. Mozart dedicated the work to his pupil Barbara Ployer, the daughter of a fellow-native of Salzburg then living in Vienna, and evidently did not wish to deprive her of the possibility of playing it with a small combination of instruments in a drawing-room. Actually, however, the wind instruments, although they seem sparingly used, can hardly be omitted; and this Concerto is not really a continuation of the type of the Salzburg concertos and the first three composed in Vienna, but a new beginning—the beginning of a new series comprising no less than twelve great Concertos, written between 9 February 1784 and 4 December 1786, and constituting the high-point of Mozart's instrumental composition. This series is followed by only the Coronation Concerto in D major and the last one, in B-flat major, written in January of the year of Mozart's death.

"Immediately after the concerto for Fräulein Ployer, he composed two more, in B-flat (K. 450) and in D (K. 451), and then, after the Piano Quintet (K. 452), still another, in G major (K. 453), a miracle of productivity in no way less extraordinary than the miracle of the three symphonies of 1788. For all these works are as different from one another as can be imagined. In an illuminating passage in a letter to his father, dated 26 May 1784, Mozart expressed himself briefly about them. He mentioned the two concertos in B-flat and D, and continued: 'I really cannot choose between the two of them, but I regard them both as concertos that are bound to make the performer sweat. From the point of view of difficulty the B♭ concerto beats the one in D. Well, I am very curious to hear which of the three, in B♭, D, and G, you and my sister prefer. The one in Eb does not belong at all to the same category. It is one of a quite peculiar kind, composed rather for a small orchestra than for a large one.'

"The E-flat Concerto is indeed 'of a quite peculiar kind.' Mozart never wrote another like it, either before or afterwards. Yet, there is a connection between the Finale of this work and the original Finale of Mozart's first Concerto (K. 175). Mozart had in the meantime experienced his contrapuntal crisis, and he wrote a Finale that is full of the contrapuntal spirit.

"But what eleven or twelve years earlier had been in some degree contrapuntal display had now become the free play of Mozart's creative gift, his natural idiom, the expression of the most complete mastery, a miracle of the fusion of styles. This work has a thematic variety and unity and an ingenuity of form that reveal the joy of the creative spirit at its highest. The first movement, too, is somewhat exceptional among Mozart's works. It voices an unrest that never tires of inventing contrasting themes. This movement, like the first movement of K. 413, is in ¾ time, and one is tempted to say that it seeks to express in E-flat major what a later movement in the same meter completely realizes— the one in the C minor Piano Concerto, K. 491. The element of unrest intensifies an old tendency in Mozart's language: a leaning towards the use of the chromatic, in both melody and harmony. A deep inner experience, about the exact nature of which we know nothing, is revealed in the more rapid changes of dynamics, the more refined and at the same time bolder chromaticism, the unity of the motives, demonstrable though concealed—in short, in a new degree of sensitiveness. At the same time, and particularly in the slow movement, an Andantino, Mozart seems to have grown simpler, and to be more than ever avoiding pathos and sentimentality. It is characteristic that in a letter to his father he emphasized the fact that none of these concertos has an Adagio. The superficial listener is to have his pleasure in them without noticing the deeper things they contain." - Alfred Einstein

Background: Igreja Nossa Senhora de Fátima (exterior), Brasília

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