- Mozart composed this concerto in Vienna at some point between 1782-3.1
- Mozart’s piano concertos were written as vehicles for his own virtuosity. He frequently performed them in concerts he organized himself while trying to make a living as a freelance musician in Vienna (something difficult to do … most musicians at the time were connected to a church or a court patron for a steady income).2
- Mozart wanted to reach as large an audience as possible, so he consciously wrote this piano concerto to appeal both to musical connoisseurs and to less experienced listeners:
“These concertos are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which the connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”
Mozart3
Sources
- Cliff Eisen, and Stanley Sadie, “Mozart, (Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed November 19, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278233.
- Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 292.
- Quoted in Ibid., 293.
Cut IDs
19827