Output details

‘We hardly knew what we should pay attention to first’: Mozart the Performer-Composer at Work on the Viennese Piano Concertos

This is the first article to give substantive scholarly consideration to how Mozart’s status as a performer-composer can affect critical understanding of his Viennese piano concertos, which are among his best-known and best-loved works. It involved examining over a protracted period all of the autographs of his piano concertos from 1784-1786 (K. 449 – K. 503), many of which are unavailable in published facsimile and are owned by different European libraries, and analyzing the small adjustments Mozart made to them. The article thus harnesses historical reception and philological evidence as a means for substantiating a claim that performance and composition are (for Mozart, as for performers and interpreters of his works today) mutually reinforcing features of a complete musical experience. A version of the article was given as the keynote address at the Royal Musical Association Conference (‘The Performer-Composer’), University of Leeds, 13 June 2008: ‘Mozart the Performer-Composer at Work on the Viennese Piano Concertos’.