Piano Concerto No. 9 (Mozart)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 in E major, K. 271, contains a moment so unusual that scholars are still writing about it. The first movement opens not with the orchestra, as every concerto of the time expected, but with the soloist interrupting almost immediately. In 1777, that was not done. Mozart was 21 years old when he wrote it.

  The concerto carries a nickname that turned out to be wrong for more than two centuries. It was called the Jeunehomme Concerto, a name pointing to a mysterious French pianist. Only in 2004 did a researcher finally establish who actually received the piece. The real story is more specific, more personal, and considerably more interesting than the legend that replaced it.

  Charles Rosen called this work perhaps the first unequivocal masterpiece of the classical style. Alfred Brendel went further, describing it as one of the greatest wonders of the world. Alfred Einstein, who spent decades studying Mozart, dubbed it Mozart's Eroica. What did Mozart do in Salzburg in January 1777 to earn those judgments, and who was the woman the concerto was written for?

• 2. Victoire Jenamy

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  Victoire Jenamy was born in 1749 and died in 1812. Her father was Jean-Georges Noverre, a dancer whom Mozart knew. She was a French virtuoso, and Mozart encountered her playing when she performed in Salzburg in December 1776.

  Her reputation as a pianist was reportedly splendid, and Mozart wrote the concerto for her. He completed it in January 1777, roughly nine months after finishing his Piano Concerto No. 8 in C major. The gap between those two works contained few significant compositions.

  Mozart performed the concerto himself at a private concert on the 4th of October 1777. Jenamy may have given the premiere earlier than that, though the record on that point is not definitive. The concerto stands as one of the few major works Mozart composed with a specific, identified performer in mind from the outset.

• 3. A Mistaken Name

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  Théodore de Wyzéwa and Georges de Saint-Foix are the scholars responsible for the long-standing confusion. They claimed the concerto was written for an unnamed French pianist called Jeunehomme, a word that means young man in French but also functions as a common French surname. That version of events held for generations.

  The problem was partly archival. Wyzéwa and Saint-Foix had to work from prior transcriptions of Mozart's letters because a difficult and uncooperative archivist denied them access to the originals. Their transcriptions introduced errors and gaps.

  Michael Lorenz demonstrated in 2004 that the dedicatee was Victoire Jenamy, not anyone called Jeunehomme. Part of the confusion traces back to Mozart and his father themselves, who referred to her in their letters as the jenomy, Madame jenome, and Madame genomai, among other variants. Wyzéwa and Saint-Foix also changed her title from Madame, which signals that she was married, to Mademoiselle, which signals that she was not. Why they made that change remains unexplained.

• 4. Breaking Convention

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  The first movement of K. 271 opens with interventions by the soloist before the orchestra has established any material on its own. Cuthbert Girdlestone, writing in 1964, noted that the departures from convention do not end with that early solo entrance. The style of dialogue between piano and orchestra throughout the movement continues to push against the norms of the time.

  Mozart wrote two cadenzas for the first movement and the second. That level of preparation speaks to how seriously he took the structural demands of the piece.

  The second movement is written in the relative minor key, which sets it apart within Mozart's own output. Only five of his piano concertos place the second movement in a minor key: K. 41, K. 271, K. 456, K. 482, and K. 488. K. 41 is an arrangement rather than an original work, which makes the pairing even rarer in practice.

• 5. The Third Movement

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  The third movement, marked Rondeau, opens with the solo piano alone. It unfolds in rondo form on a large scale, but partway through it stops and turns into something else: a slow minuet section in the subdominant key of A major.

  That interruption of a rondo with a minuet was not a standard procedure. Mozart used it again in his 22nd concerto, composed in 1785, which is also in the key of E major. The two works share that structural strategy across nearly a decade.

  After the minuet section, the movement returns to the original tempo and closes there. The whole effect is that of a piece that keeps interrupting itself productively, finding new material each time before returning home.

• 6. How Critics Heard It

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  Girdlestone's praise for the concerto carried a qualification. He wrote that the slow movement, while a great leap forward for Mozart, was still somewhat limited. In his view, K. 271 as a whole did not reach the level of the piano concertos Mozart wrote during his peak years in Vienna from 1784 to 1787, and it was not equal to his best compositions overall.

  More recently, the Mozart scholar Simon P. Keefe described the concerto as characterized by a conciseness of thematic development, a depth of expression in the Andantino in particular, and a level of exuberant virtuosity in the finale that surpasses anything in Mozart's preceding piano concertos.

  The tension between those two readings is worth holding. Girdlestone places the work below the Vienna concertos; Keefe finds it surpassing everything that came before it. Both accounts locate the Andantino as the emotional center, and both acknowledge that the finale's virtuosity is something new for Mozart at that point in his career.