Mozart / Piano Concerto No. 11 in F major, K. 413 (Anda)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Piano Concerto No. 11 in F major, K. 413 (1782)

00:00 - Allegro (Cadenza: Anda)
08:37 - Larghetto (Cadenza: Anda)
15:46 - Tempo di Menuetto

Géza Anda (Pianist & Conductor) performs with the Camerata Salzburg (Camerata Academica des Salzburger Mozarteums).

"It seems as if Mozart still had in mind the ideal of the amiable clavier concertos of [Johann Samuel] Schröter when, in the fall of 1782 and the first months of 1783, he wrote his first three Vienna works in this form. Or perhaps it was that he knew his public, and wished to charm them with amiability rather than risk offending them by too aggressive originality. From the very first he was thinking of publication—publication in Paris, where he had made the acquaintance of the Schröter concertos, and where he felt he could hope for a particularly good reception. At first, in January 1783, he offered them in Vienna in manuscript copies at a subscription price of 4 ducats; but as early as 26 April he wrote to the Parisian publisher, J. G. Sieber, 'I have three piano concertos ready, which can be performed with full orchestra, that is to say with oboes and horns, or merely a quattro. Artaria wants to engrave them. But I give you, my friend, the first refusal.'

"However, Sieber either replied that he did not wish to pay the thirty louis d'or that Mozart demanded or else did not reply at all, for the three concertos were published by Artaria in Vienna two years later, in March 1785, as Op. IV.

"The alternative possibilities provided for by Mozart in these concertos—performance either by full orchestra including oboes and horns (in the third one, in C major, including trumpets and timpani also), or by string quartet—are enough to show that we are not dealing with 'great' concertos. The winds are not essential, as they contribute nothing not fully expressed by the strings; their function is only to lend color or rhythmic emphasis. These works may very well be played as chamber music by a pianist with string quartet accompaniment. No one characterized them better than Mozart himself (see his letter of 28 December 1782). How naive and at the same time how penetrating are his esthetics! And what a high moral standard underlies them: the composer must make things hard for himself and easy for the listener. The fact that Mozart did indeed make things hard for himself is shown by the existence of a second Rondo (K. 386) for the first of the three Concertos (in A major. K. 414), which he left in the form of a sketch so complete that there is no difficulty about supplying the little that is missing. No doubt the reason for abandoning it was that it repeated certain melodic turns of phrase that had appeared in the first movement. To us it seems at least as attractive as the Rondo Mozart used for this work, and perhaps even superior to it. The warmest and most alive movement of this charming little Concerto is the Andante, with its Schubertean appoggiature in the cadence, and with its romantic, murmuring accompaniment figure in thirds. One has the impression that this movement must have been composed after the Concerto in F (K. 413), which breathes nothing but amiability throughout its three movements, and offers something special to 'connoisseurs' only in the fine contrapuntal writing of the Rondo, a Tempo di minuetto; perhaps also in the triple meter of the first movement, triple meter being very unusual in a first movement. Mozart obviously wished to offer three very different types of concertos, contrasting in key, and each typical in its own key. If the first is rather naive and pastoral, and the second more poetic and amoureux, the last, in C major, with its trumpets and timpani, is the most brilliant and the most conventional, but it, too, is full of individual details and refinements. Mozart originally wished to write the second movement in C minor, but soon realized that that would make it much too serious for the character of these works, and instead wrote one of the least ambitious slow movements in any of his works. To make up for this, he inserted in the Finale, in which we already hear some of Papageno's motives, a C minor episode, which, in these surroundings, and with exaggerated ornamentation, is almost comically doleful. The principle of surprise is carried so far in this Finale as to make it almost a capriccio. At any rate, Mozart succeeded in pleasing the taste of the Viennese." - Alfred Einstein

Painting: Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, Pierre Gobert