Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 271 (Jenamy)

Mozart completed this concerto in January 1777. Its first performance was probably by Mozart himself, during a visit to Mannheim in late 1777. Duration 30:00.

Background

Mozart spent most of his early life touring Europe as child prodigy with his father Leopold, looking for a prominent position for the phenomenally talented younger Mozart. By 1775, his years as a Wunderkind were over, however, and the young Mozart returned to Salzburg to serve his father’s patron, Archbishop Colleredo. Aside from a few extended job-hunting trips, he would spend most of the next six years in his home town. This period, spent in provincial Salzburg is often painted as a frustrating time for young Mozart, who worked for much of his early 20s to get out from under the wing of his protective and sometimes overbearing father. But he was also surrounded by good friends, and—particularly in the early years—was astonishingly productive. He also seems to have enjoyed the role of a young, but very big fish in a very small pond! He composed symphonies, concertos, serenades, chamber works and even operas while in the Archbishop’s employ, all the time working as a church musician for the Archbishop. Among the finest works he composed in Salzburg was the Piano Concerto No.9—completed within a few weeks of his 21st birthday.

The name associated with this concerto was for more than two centuries one of the great Mozart mysteries. In the 1770s, there are several references in Mozart’s letters to a pianist, “Mademoiselle Jenomy” (a name he and his father spelled differently in nearly every reference to her), for whom he composed the concerto. Mozart’s biographers knew little else about this rather mysterious female pianist, but in one influential biography written in 1912, the authors—knowing that Mozart’s spelling was no better than that of most 18th-century writers—decided that he was Italianizing a French name, and that the concerto was written for a “Mademoiselle Jeunehomme.” The work was known popularly as the “Jeunehomme” concerto for nearly a century. But in 2003, Mozart scholar Michael Lorenz found that Mozart’s spelling was not quite as bad as previously thought! He identified the pianist as Victoire Jenamy (1749-1812), the daughter of a prominent dancer and choreographer George Noverre. Noverre and Mozart were friends and professional colleagues: Noverre had choreographed a performance of Mozart’s opera Lucio Silla a few years earlier During the composer’s visit to Paris in 1778, Mozart also composed a fine score for Noverre’s ballet Les petits riens. It was through Noverre that Mozart knew Victoire Jenamy, who was married to a wealthy Viennese merchant. She was not a professional musician, but she did play occasionally in public and well enough to attract at least one admiring review in a Viennese paper. She apparently commissioned the concerto in 1776, though it is not clear whether she ever performed it. For his part, Mozart liked the concerto well enough to play it in both Mannheim and Paris in 1777 and 1778, and later programmed it on his concerts in Vienna.

What You’ll Hear

The best-known of Mozart’s piano concertos are the series he wrote for his own concerts in Vienna in the 1780s, but No. 9, the last of the solo piano concertos he wrote in Salzburg, stands alongside these late masterpieces. It is one of the best of his early works: the biographer Alfred Einstein called it Mozart’s “Eroica” for its boldness and innovation. This begins in the opening bars of the first movement (Allegro): concertos typically begin with an orchestral exposition, but here, the solo part jumps in during the first few measures, before stepping aside to allow the orchestra to introduce the main ideas. Near the end of this section, the piano enters with a long trill and short bit of lyricism as a bridge to is its own exposition. The development is particularly long and intense, carried almost completely by the piano. When the main ideas are recapitulated, Mozart presents them in a new order and in shortened form. As usual, there is space near the end for a solo cadenza, but rather untypically, Mozart composed a set of cadenzas for this concerto, rather than leave them to improvisation.

The brooding Andantino was Mozart’s first concerto middle movement written in a minor key. The inspiration here was clearly operatic, and the piano’s solo aria here is broken occasionally by passages that sound like recitative. The movement develops a pair of long lyrical phrases and culminates in an emotional cadenza. The closing movement (Rondo: Presto) is a complete contrast: music tied together by an energetic theme that also seems suited for opera, but in this case a fast-paced comic scene. (Several writers have noted the similarity between this bustling theme and an aria sung by Monastatos in Mozart’s Magic Flute.) Between repeats and developments of this idea, Mozart places varied contrasting episodes: a suddenly wistful moment for the solo piano, a short cadenza that leads into a surprisingly extended courtly minuet, a long solo passage that maneuvers the music back to the main theme, and an exuberant closing passage that turns flippant at the very end.