Piano Concerto in E flat major K449 (1784)

When writing for female performers – not only singers but instrumentalists too – Mozart tended to produce music that was particularly seductive or particularly impressive. The second of the two piano concertos he wrote for his pupil Babette (or Barbara) Ployer, the one in G K.453, is such an attractive piece that even the composer’s pet starling was persuaded to learn a tune from it. The Concerto in E fat K449 written for the same pianist only two months earlier is a less indulgent work where, in the first movement at least, melodic charm is less important an attribute of the thematic material than its structural value. The opening theme, for example, is melodically unremarkable but thoroughly distinctive in its prominent trills. Treated rather severely as it is thrust at an early stage into the relative minor – causing some harmonic disorientation before the situation is corrected by second subject on the strings – it makes an emphatic return both at the end of the orchestral exposition and on the first entry of the piano. Although the soloist introduces a diversionary second-subject melody, the main theme dominates the development section almost to the point of obsession. While it has no function in the cadenza (assuming that the soloist chooses to play Mozart’s own), it returns immediately after it to motivate the coda.

Not at all severe, the Andantino is based on two themes chosen for their melodic interest and the opportunity they give the soloist for linear decoration and instrumental colouring. Even so, the main interest of the movement is in the harmonic adventures which the thematic material so innocently gets involved in and somehow survives. Babette can scarcely have failed to be charmed by it, in spite of its precarious harmonies, just as she must have been impressed by Mozart’s mastery of counterpoint in the finale – though not so much by the academic technique that lies behind it as by the way in which the composer so wittily conceals his art that it seems never to be applied for its own sake. The coda, which begins with a change of metre from the hitherto prevailing 2/2 to a dancing 6/8, is a cheerfully satirical comment on contrapuntal learning.