Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- Part II The works
- 3 The Italian concerto in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
- 4 The concerto in northern Europe to c.1770
- 5 The concerto from Mozart to Beethoven: aesthetic and stylistic perspectives
- 6 The nineteenth-century piano concerto
- 7 Nineteenth-century concertos for strings and winds
- 8 Contrasts and common concerns in the concerto 1900–1945
- 9 The concerto since 1945
- Part III Performance
- Notes
- Selected further reading
- Index
6 - The nineteenth-century piano concerto
from Part II - The works
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts
- Part II The works
- 3 The Italian concerto in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
- 4 The concerto in northern Europe to c.1770
- 5 The concerto from Mozart to Beethoven: aesthetic and stylistic perspectives
- 6 The nineteenth-century piano concerto
- 7 Nineteenth-century concertos for strings and winds
- 8 Contrasts and common concerns in the concerto 1900–1945
- 9 The concerto since 1945
- Part III Performance
- Notes
- Selected further reading
- Index
Summary
The piano concerto manifests a remarkable expansion during the nineteenth century in terms of the number of composers writing works in the form, and in the basic parameters of the genre itself; that is, the number of movements, size of the individual sections, instrumentation of the orchestra, and the technical demands placed on the soloist. The piano concerto is the most high-profile subspecies of the genre at this time. This chapter will investigate issues such as compositional responses to Mozart, and then Beethoven, the role of virtuosity, structural developments in the form, symphonic dimensions, and programmatic aspects of individual works.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, composers continued to exploit the possibilities inherent in the piano concerto genre as codified by Mozart, whose twenty-three original concertos had all been published by 1806. A study of almost any concerto composed during the first third of the nineteenth century (and considerably later as well) reveals the profound influence of these works. Mozart's concertos were performed by nearly every composer in the early nineteenth century (as Beethoven's would be later in the century), creating a tradition which, of course, continues to this day. The nineteenth century also saw a dramatic increase in the number of municipal concert venues and music festivals associated with the rise of the middle class in the wake of the industrial revolution, in combination with the existing venues belonging to the nobility, cities, states and countries.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto , pp. 93 - 117Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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