Mozart - Piano Concerto No.24 in C Minor, K. 491

The Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 is a concertante work for piano, or pianoforte, and orchestra by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart composed the concerto in the winter of 1785--1786 and completed the work on 24 March 1786. The premiere was on 7 April 1786 at the Burgtheater, Vienna.

The concerto has the following three movements:
1. Allegro in C minor
2. Larghetto in E-flat major
3. Allegretto (Variations) in C minor

It is scored for flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings. Of the Mozart piano concertos, this one has the most complete scoring. (It is the only one scored for both oboes and clarinets.) It is also the only late Mozart piano concerto in which the soloist plays after the cadenza in the first movement, here adorning an orchestral argument based on the extremely chromatic opening theme of the work with arpeggios, all the way through to the quiet close. It is one of only two minor-key piano concertos (the other being No. 20 in D Minor), and one of only three concertos where the first movement is in 3/4 time (the others being No. 11 and No. 14).

The whole performance lasts roughly 30 minutes. The concerto has long been considered one of Mozart's greatest works. Arthur Hutchings has described it as the most "concerted" of all the concertos (i.e. the most integrated). Girdlestone has also effectively claimed it as the greatest. Ludwig van Beethoven took particular inspiration for his own music from this concerto.

Richard Strauss played his own cadenza for the concerto in 1885. The work has obvious musical antecedents in Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 78, also in C minor and from which the Concerto's opening statement is drawn. Jonathan Stock has analysed in detail Mozart's use of woodwind timbre in the instrumentation of the concerto's slow movement.

Chris Goertzen has mapped the structure of the slow movement. The concerto was first published in parts in 1800. The manuscript of the concerto resides at the Royal College of Music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 -- 5 December 1791), baptised as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era.

Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty.

At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly.

While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his influence on subsequent Western art music is profound; Beethoven composed his own early works in the shadow of Mozart, and Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."

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