Piano Concerto no. 9 in E-flat major, K. 271

Composed in Salzburg in January 1777 and long known as the Jeunehomme concerto, after a French pianist whom nobody could identify. In 2004 Michael Lorenz established that the player was Victoire Jenamy, daughter of the choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre and a friend of the Mozart family; the nickname was a corruption of her surname. The concerto breaks its own conventions in the opening bars, the soloist answering the orchestra in the second measure instead of waiting for the exposition to end, and its C minor slow movement is the first movement of genuinely tragic weight Mozart wrote for the keyboard. Mozart left two cadenzas for the first movement and wrote cadenzas for the slow movement as well. The closing Rondo is cut across by a slow minuet episode before the fast music returns — a device he used again in the Piano Concerto no. 22, K. 482.