Mozart's Piano Music

Abstract

Mozart's emergence as a mature artist coincides with the rise to prominence of the piano, an instrument that came alive under his fingers and served as medium for many of his finest compositions. This book reconsiders common assumptions about Mozart's life and art while offering commentary on the solo music and concertos. After placing Mozart's pianistic legacy in its larger biographical and cultural context, the book addresses the lively gestural and structural aspects of Mozart's musical language and explores the nature of his creative process. Incorporating recent research the book surveys each of the major genres of the keyboard music, including the four-hand and two-piano works. Beyond examining issues such as Mozart's earliest childhood compositions, his musical rhetoric and expression, the social context of his Viennese concertos, and affinities between his piano works and operas, the book's main emphasis falls on detailed discussion of selected individual compositions. It challenges the common conception of Mozart's effortless compositional abilities, and provides illuminating examples of his painstaking revision process. As the book shows, Mozart created in the last fifteen years of his life an almost incomparably rich legacy of works for keyboard, beginning with the six solo sonatas of 1775 and extending to such pieces as the final Concerto in B flat, K. 595, from 1791.