Mozart piano concerto 20 hummel cadenza

One of the essential things about music is how it’s so hard to pin down, so hard to fix in time, and so hard to be definitive about. In looking at cadenzas, those virtuosic flourishes that appear in concertos, we can do no better than to look at Mozart’s Piano Concertos.

We know that for most of the concertos, they generally had their first performance under his hands as soloist. This means that for many of his concertos, he didn’t write down the cadenzas because he, as composer, literally had the work at his fingertips.

Mozart piano concerto 20 sheet music

Mozart was famous for his ability to improvise and it is thought that he not only improvised the cadenzas but also probably improvised throughout any performance he gave – he used the music he wrote, but played so much more.

Of his 27 piano concertos, only 15 have cadenzas in his hand.

The others have either been lost over time or were never written down in the first place. At the time of Mozart, performers would still have been expected to create their ow