Dilettante Music

The undated A major Piano Concerto of late 1782 was the first of 15 that Mozart composed, mainly for his own use, before the end of 1786. Infused throughout with his special genius, these concertos became (and remain) unparalleled in Western music as a body of work, all the more astounding given the chronologically brief span in which he created them.

In the late spring of 1781, Mozart succeeded in breaking free from Hieronymous Colloredo -- the haughty and parsimonious prince-archbishop of Salzburg, in whose service he felt stultified -- determined to make his fortune in Vienna. If his income over the next decade did not regularly reflect the quality or quantity of music that Mozart produced, he did become famous. For four years the fickle Hapsburg capital proclaimed him its favorite pianist until, in 1786, The Marriage of Figaro triggered his fall from grace.

The patronage of his Empire's aristocracy supported Mozart after 1782 as a concert artist, publisher, piano teacher, and soloist at their soirées. When the anti-aristocratic Figaro seemed to bite this feeding hand, it was withdrawn -- a situation grimly worsened by the Ottoman armies' 1788 attack on the southeastern flank of the Hapsburg' Holy Roman Empire. Music lost its priority in Vienna, then fell largely silent when Joseph II died in 1790, of a disease contracted in the field.

Early in the decade, Mozart had written the Concerto No. 12 along with Nos. 11 and 13, completing them in that order for his debut concerts of 1783 (during Lent, when theaters and the opera went dark by decree until Easter). He described their character in a letter to his father dated December 28, 1782, as "...a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less discriminating cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why."

He could have remarked, too, on their thematic abundance -- there are no fewer than six major subjects in the first movement alone of No. 12, two of which are new in the development section. Charles Rosen has pointed out in The Classical Style that here, as well as in later concertos, "Mozart uses melodies at once so complex and so complete that they do not bear the weight of [further] development." Because he hoped to sell the three concertos for home performance with string quartet, he scored No. 12 lightly -- the orchestra consists of just two oboes, two horns, and strings. The middle movement is a solemn, sonata-structured Andante in D major with a minor-key development. Its main subject is taken from an overture by Johann Christian Bach, Mozart's childhood friend and teacher, who had died on January 1, 1782 -- "a sad day for the world of music," wrote the boy-prodigy, now grown to manhood. The final movement is an Allegretto rondo, no less genial for being gentle, with a refrain in 2/4 time built on three motifs and contrapuntal complexities that are submerged in a delightfully light exterior in the way that only Mozart could. Here as elsewhere in the A major Concerto, cadenzas are by the composer; the soloist may choose from among several. ~ All Music Guide