Horn Concerto No. 1 (Mozart)
concerto for horn and orchestra composed by W. A. Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the Horn Concerto No. 1 in D major, K. (412+514)/386b, in 1791.
Details
The work is in two movements. Unusually, each movement received a distinct number in the first edition of the Köchel catalogue: (K. 514)
The concerto is scored for solo horn in D, two oboes, two bassoons, and strings. This is one of two horn concertos of Mozart to include bassoons (the other is Horn Concerto No. 3, K. 447), but in this one he "treats them indifferently in the first movement". It is the only one of Mozart's horn concertos to be in D major (the rest are in E♭ major) and the only one to have just two movements instead of the usual three (with the exception of the incompletely scored horn concerto, K. 370b+371).
Although numbered first, this was actually the last of the four to be completed. Compared to the other three horn concertos, it is shorter in duration (two movements rather than three) and is much simpler in regard to both range and technique, perhaps in a nod to the horn player (Mozart's great friend) Joseph Leutgeb's advanced age and (presumably) reduced capabilities at the time of composition. The second movement, K. 514, was shown by Alan Tyson to have been finished by Mozart's student Franz Xaver Süssmayr after Mozart's death.
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This entry incorporates text from “Horn Concerto No. 1 (Mozart)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.