Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat, K.595

Composition and premiere: Mozart completed this, his final piano concerto, on January 5, 1791, and gave the first performance on March 4 that year in Vienna in a concert given by the clarinetist Joseph Bähr. The first Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood performance featured soloist Rudolf Serkin and was led by Erich Leinsdorf on July 7, 1963, though Arthur Fiedler had conducted it with the Boston Pops a generation earlier, on June 8, 1937, with Ruth Culbertson as soloist.

Concertos had a kind of twilight existence in the 18th into the 19th centuries. Like Mozart, many composers were also virtuosos, and most of the time they wrote concertos for themselves. Meanwhile if you wrote them for the benefit of your career, you were not likely to be playing ones by other composers. There is no record that Mozart in his maturity played anything other than his own concertos, most of them written in Vienna for his public concerts.

There was another element that made concertos special. Unlike the procedure with other pieces, which were premiered and then published or rented out, with concertos you wrote one, premiered it, played it for a while, and when it had made the rounds you wrote a new one and published or, most of the time, retired the old one. One result of this situation was that once a concerto had been played out by its composer, it often faded from sight. So it was that the Beethoven concertos, including the one for violin, were not heard all that much for years after he died. After getting a letter from Clara Schumann bemoaning how little audiences seemed interested in her playing of Mozart concertos, Johannes Brahms wrote back, with a sigh: “The fact that the public in general does not understand and appreciate the best things is the reason people like me get famous.” In our day, of course, the stature of the Mozart concertos has been established for a long time, and they’re viewed as essentially the foundation of the entire concerto repertoire that followed them.

The Piano Concerto in B-flat, K.595, is the 27th and last of his for piano, finished just months before he died. He wrote it for a concert of a clarinetist friend and was soloist at the premiere on March 4, 1791, in Vienna. This was his last appearance as a concerto soloist. The piece is often described as a low-key, nostalgic look backward, and there may be some of that involved. But it’s more accurately called a testament to a composer still in motion and on the verge of a new direction.

A work is not a random assemblage of movements; it has a prevailing character. The character of K.595, though, is veiled and elusive. In it Mozart combines great simplicity with some of the most searching harmony of his life, the kind of harmony we associate with the Romantic composers of the next generations. To its fluid treatment of keys is joined a fluid approach to form: each movement states a simple, direct theme, and from that point, theme and harmony are constantly in development. There are hardly any “second themes” proper in the piece. The paradox of the B-flat concerto is that this searching, steadily developmental quality is not exploited for any sort of drama or passion, but rather serves a world serene and sometimes wonderfully touching—especially in the second movement, which is a kind of trance of beauty.

All of this is laid out in the first movement, which begins and ends softly. While it gets full-throated here and there, from its galant opening theme gentleness prevails. That theme is interrupted by a little fanfare that renders things just a bit off-kilter. After two pages of straightforward harmony that never strays from B-flat major, a chromatic phrase intrudes. Much will come of that phrase. Simplicity wandering into unexpected places is the essential dialectic of this concerto—though again, a dialectic to be wielded not for drama but rather with enormous subtlety both musical and emotional.

After a sudden and quietly surprising moment in the rare key of B-flat minor, the soloist enters on the opening theme, and from that point things get exploratory. There are long stretches where the harmony is in flux, never cadencing. The development section begins in B minor, about as far from the main key of B-flat major as you can get, and from there drifts into a still more exotic E-flat minor, a key so rare in those days that theorists generally never mentioned it. In the solo part the virtuosity is kept low-key: lots of racing scales and such, but nothing all that showy. The same applies to the cadenzas that Mozart wrote for the concerto.

The second movement starts with a theme at once modest and touching, and from there the movement only gets more heart-tugging. It reveals more clearly where in terms of his art Mozart is headed: toward the sublime late style of The Magic Flute, in which ingenuous simplicity is somehow made magical. All the same, in the slow movement the harmonic excursions and the steadily developmental quality remain.

All of that carries into the finale, which in terms of the usual outline is a rondo, but barely: the B section has no very defined theme. The opening is in a loping 6/8, more or less a “hunting” tune, a familiar topic of the time. One would expect here some Mozartian gaiety, exuberant fun, glittering virtuosity, and so on. But that is again kept under wraps in a movement that once more combines the ingenuous and the searching. One thing prophetic in it: the rather goofy main theme has a “Papageno” quality that will turn up again in the comic bird-man of The Magic Flute.

So here we have perhaps the most reticent of the works from Mozart’s last year. In that parade of very special pieces, this one has its own quiet place. Historians of the past have tried to gin up the biographical drama by making K.595 and the Clarinet Concerto valedictory pieces. Really, there’s no solid evidence that Mozart had premonitions of his end. But then, in the middle of great success with The Magic Flute and writing the Requiem, which he loved doing, he suddenly found himself on his deathbed.

So Mozart was not saying farewell but rather the opposite: moving toward a new and deeper chapter in his art. In seeking to characterize this elusive concerto, it’s perhaps relevant that a few days after he finished it, Mozart used the tune of the finale for the song “Longing for Spring” (“Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling,” K.596), which begins: “Come, sweet May, and turn the trees green again, / and make the little violets bloom for me by the brook.” It’s a song about yearning and expectation, about the future, written by a composer who, as it turned out, had very little future left. Mozart departed the world in mid-stride.

Jan Swafford

Jan Swafford is a prizewinning composer and writer whose acclaimed books include Mozart: The Reign of Love, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, and Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music. He is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied composition.