- Mozart composed this concerto in January of 1777. It was one of the last piano concertos he composed while employed in Salzburg by Archbishop Colloredo.1
- Since around 1912, when Mozart biographers Teodor de Wyzewa and Georges de Saint-Foix transcribed the name of this concerto’s dedicatee as “Mlle Jeunehomme,” scholars have had a hard time finding any details about the mysterious dedicatee.2 In 2004, musicologist Michael Lorenz identified the dedicatee as Victoire Jenamy (1749-1812), a French pianist who was the daughter of ballet master J.G. Noverre, a friend of both W.A. and Leopold Mozart.3
- The Mozarts had referred to Jenamy in letters as “Mde. Jenomé,” “Mde. Genomai,” or “Mde. Jenomy,” and those early biographers transcribed the name as “Jeunehomme” (for reasons that are still a matter of debate among musicologists).4
- Victoire Jenamy did not simply “inspire” this concerto, as some older sources suggest: it is more likely that she commissioned it. Also, contrary to older sources, which claim that Mozart met “Mlle Jeunehomme” in Salzburg in 1777, there is no evidence that Jenamy visited Salzburg.5
Sources
- Cliff Eisen and Stanley Sadie, “Mozart, (Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-6002278233.
- Kris Steyaert, “Mozart with a French Twist: ‘Mademoiselle Jeunehomme’ Revisited,” The Musical Times 157, no. 1937 (2016): 6, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44862784.
- Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe, The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 232.
- Steyaert, “Mozart with a French Twist,” 8.
- Eisen and Simon P. Keefe, The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia, 232.
Cut IDs
41187 43550