Allegro from Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466

Regarding the piano concerto, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart surpassed his contemporaries. Two of his most famous contributions to the genre—the Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466, and the Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467—were composed during two months early in 1785. Mozart’s father, Leopold, described the first performance of the D-Minor Concerto in a letter to his daughter on February 14, 1785, in which he wrote of “an excellent clavier concerto [K.466] by Wolfgang … When we arrived the copyist was still copying it out, which left your brother no time to play over the rondo even once, because he had to revise the copies.” The D-Minor Concerto was especially popular with composers in the Romantic period; Beethoven wrote the cadenzas played most frequently today, and Johannes Brahms—who owned the manuscript for several years—also composed a set. (Unless the solo part was played by someone else, Mozart rarely notated his cadenzas, preferring to improvise on the spot.)

What drew subsequent generations of composers to K. 466 in particular? For one thing, the concerto was the first Mozart had composed in a minor key—and not just any minor key, but that of D minor, which he later used to great effect in Don Giovanni and the Requiem. Mozart also challenges convention throughout the work, a fact that is evident from the opening. In the first movement, the aggressive opening melody is delegated to the orchestra while the piano enters with gentle, more lyrical material. Mozart maintains this separation between solo and orchestral material throughout the movement while simultaneously creating the impression of musical homogeneity.