Mozart Piano Concerto

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria, and died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna. He had composed numerous piano concertos, however, this essay would be discussing the social and historical factors that has influenced Mozart to compose one of his famous piano concertos in C Major, K.467.

Mozart had arrived in Vienna in 1781 in search of a better musical platform. The musical life in Vienna during the 1780s was one of the world’s greatest then. Mozart was greatly confident that he would be able to make his mark in Vienna, as he knew that he had experience from all over the world, however, it took him a long time before he could make it big there. He left Munich in 1781 and settled in Vienna when he was at the age of 25. He had encountered many different problems from composing operas to establishing his footing through concerts during the first few weeks of his stay. He was attracted by the amount of money he could earn from staging private concerts in Vienna. However, during the first few weeks of settling down, Mozart was not able to succeed in earning money from private concerts. Mozart was known to perform pieces that were not recent and have already been played in other concerts of his own. Therefore, in 1784 he decided to earn a greater fortune by being both a performer, as well as a composer. He would then begin to compose his own concertos for his performances. The combination of being a composer and a performer had benefitted him in countless ways and thus building his fame.

467 was completed on the 9th of March 1785. Although it was written 4 weeks after the concerto in D Minor K. 466, there were hardly any similarities between these two pieces. Of all Mozart’s C Major concertos, this concerto has the most consistent level of fame. It was also one of his most joyful works. It had possessed many different ideas from his previously composed concertos. Letter of Leopold Mozart, 14 January 1786: ‘ Indeed the new concerto is astonishingly difficult. But I very much doubt whether there are any mistakes, as the copyist has checked it. Several passages simply do not harmonize unless one hears all the instruments playing together.’ Instead of having a fanfare like opening, this concerto started piano. Mozart had the intention to stray away from the usual structural blocks of tuttis and solos in the first movement. “He sometimes had symphonic development in mind as he constructs the opening tutti, so that new musical situations do not develop by perceptible stages but each proceeds smoothly out of the one before; and in addition he gets to work on the ‘punctuation’ of the solo exposition.”(Küster) This new style also included having stronger relative remote keys used as a modulation than the previous piano concertos, in which the main functions completely dominated the musical course of