Talk:Piano Concerto No. 24 (Mozart)

No words for such a masterpiece?

I think its useless this article being expanded. This concert is an emanation of pure genius in rhytmic, chromatic and all other musical aspects. No one can describe such a masterpiece with words. Tangra680 15:48, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

But we can try. That's what Wikipedia is all about. —  $PЯINGrαgђ  17:58, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but it's very stupid to think like that. All this sublimity that you describe is sheltered in a language, that is made of artifice. Art is deprehension of language, we must be the interlocutor of music to dialogue with it, to reconstruct what it calls of our perception. There is much to elucidate about this work that was not made here. --Leonardo T. Oliveira (talk) 00:11, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Beethoven's Lament

A commonly told story is that Beethoven lamented to one of his students when listening to this concerto that he "would never write a theme as good as this one". I think it was one from the finale, but I'm not sure. I don't think it was the first movement theme. Does anyone know? It would make a nice addition to the article. DavidRF (talk) 20:47, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I too heard that once long ago from a pianist, I think he said it was in the slow movement.

About Hummel's transcription of this concerto, there might be something about it in Grayson's book about the D minor concerto. James470 (talk) 02:50, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

The quote I was looking for is paraphrased in Steinberg's Concerto book. Sort of mentioned in passing that Beethoven sighed "Ah, we shall never be able to do anything like this". Doesn't say which movement (or if he was referring the the whole thing).DavidRF (talk) 03:32, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Wrong reference?

The text says that "Chris Goertzen has mapped the structure of the slow movement", and points to the note 6: "Goertzen, Chris (1991). "Compromises in Orchestration in Mozart's Coronation Concerto". The Musical Quarterly 75 (2): 148–173. doi:10.1093/mq/75.2.148. http://mq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/75/2/148. Retrieved 2008-03-15".

As you can see, this text seems to talk about Piano Concerto No. 26 "Coronation", not about this one. Is that right? The access to this reference is restrict. --Leonardo T. Oliveira (talk) 00:11, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm restricted too. Its a long article. It might talk of this concerto as well. I'm not sure what the point of the statements in that paragraph are though. They mention a couple of articles, but nothing about them. I wouldn't mind removing them.DavidRF (talk) 00:22, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

The bulk of the article is about the Coronation Concerto, but on page 158, Goertzen compares the slow movement of K. 537 to that of K. 491, and on the next page there is a diagram for K. 491 followed by one for K. 537. James470 (talk) 03:11, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

It is correct that Goertzen's article maps the middle movement of the K. 491. But I don't know why the Wikipedia article needs to say this. A number of scholars have mapped the second movement, including Hutchings and Girdlestone. Syek88 (talk) 07:08, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Piano Concerto No. 24 (Mozart)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Tim riley (talk · contribs) 06:35, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Starting first read-through. More soonest. Tim riley talk 06:35, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Comments

• General
  • I'm not quite clear which variety of English the article is meant to be in. The date format is British, as are the spelling (metre, utilise) and punctuation (Hutchings's) but the technical terms are American (measures, sixteenth note).
  • As a general stylistic point (and not something that affects the promotability of the article) we have "commence" seven times, and a plain "begin" or "start" would be a welcome change here and there. There are seven "howevers" too, most of which weaken the prose and would be better removed.
• Lead
  • WP:OVERLINK – piano and orchestra (in my opinion) and Vienna and British (unquestionably) should not be linked. As to the last, why tell us that Hutchings was British, anyway?
• Background
  • "Vienna" – overlink again: see the MoS: we don't link "everyday words understood by most readers in context or the names of major geographic features and locations…"
  • In 1800 Constanze was Mozart's widow, rather than his wife.
  • "Scottish" – overlink.
  • "German" – ditto, though why is his nationality relevant anyway?
• Exposition
  • "measures" – link needed for the benefit of non-American readers
  • "British" – overlink, and Tovey's nationality is irrelevant.
• Development
  • "Sixteenth notes" – link needed for non-American readers
• Recapitulation, cadenza and coda
  • "The wide range of thematic material presented … presents" – too many presents
  • "The last theme to be recapitulated is secondary theme" – is there a definite or indefinite article missing here?
  • "cadenza" – duplicate link: we've already linked from the "First movement" section.
• Second movement
  • "Austrian" – overlink, and besides, once again, the person's nationality is not relevant to this article. Brendel's views would be just as ad rem if he were from Outer Mongolia.
• Third movement
  • "The British pianist Angela Hewitt" – another nationality that we don't need.
  • "over an string and wind accompaniment" – either "an" should be "a" or there is an adjective missing after it.
  • "cut common time" – we've already linked to this earlier.
• Critical reception
  • Another gratuitous "British"
  • "Keefe … writes that the No. 24 is the "climactic and culminating work" – no he doesn't. He writes that it is "a climactic and culminating work" – which is not the same thing as "the climactic and culminating work".
  • "Mozart's piano concerto oeuvre" – Keefe italicises "'oeuvre" and we should follow suit in the quotation here
  • And another unwanted national tag, for King.
• References
  • "The two WP:Bare URLs within refs 6 and 7 need fixing.
• Sources
  • No OCLC numbers for the older books?
  • Some publishers are given locations, and others are not: either is acceptable but be consistent.

This is a longish list of queries, but there's nothing there that can't be fixed reasonably easily, and so I am putting the review on hold for a week to give you time to address these points. – Tim riley talk 08:04, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Many thanks for the review, Tim. I have little doubt that I will be able to correct these problems within a week, if not considerably sooner. Regarding your first bullet point, I use British English but prefer American terminology for musical notation. The term "crotchet" will mean nothing to an American, but the term "quarter note" is descriptive and meaningful - a British-English speaker could discern what it means. Does the use of British English for spelling and punctuation mean that the musical terminology also needs to be British? If so, I can of course change the terminology. On an entirely unrelated note, I hope the music theory parts of the article were not too dense and technical. That was my main concern when writing the article. Syek88 (talk) 08:18, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Your rationale seems wholly sensible now you explain it, and I see no reason why you shouldn't use the American technical terms within a BrEng article. But please link them as suggested above. If you want the rest of the prose to be in BrEng, though, you should change "Variations II through VI" to "Variations II to VI"; and the usual British form of adjective for the composer is "Mozartian" (the OED confirms this). To my mind you have the balance of technicalities just right: enough technical information to satisfy readers who know their music theory, but not so much as to overwhelm the lay person. Tim riley talk 09:05, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, again. I have made all of the amendments, including the two additional ones (Variations II to IV and Mozartian). As you foreshadowed, it was a long list but only ended up taking a couple of hours. I found OCLC numbers for the older books; I had to reverse-engineer them from WorldCat though. I hope that is acceptable. As for the bare URLs, I simply removed them. Thank you in particular for correcting me on the Simon P. Keefe quote. Syek88 (talk) 10:34, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Good. I always go to WorldCat for OCLC numbers – can't think of any better way. Your article had me looking through my accumulated concert programmes: I find I never heard Brendel play K491 in the concert hall, but I did catch him in Beethoven 3 in 1974. Delighted to have had the pleasure of reviewing this article. – Tim riley talk 12:39, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Review summary

1. Is it reasonably well written?

   A. Prose quality:

   B. MoS compliance:

2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?

   A. References to sources:

   B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

   C. No original research:

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. Major aspects:

   B. Focused:

4. Is it neutral?

   Fair representation without bias:

5. Is it stable?

   No edit wars, etc:

6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?

   A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

   B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

TFAR

Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/Piano Concerto No. 24 (Mozart) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:49, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

Audio link?

I don't see any way at all to listen to the audio - what am I missing here? Wnt (talk) 13:17, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

I tend to think it's best to let people find their own version rather than force one upon them. And the free versions to which we are limited are necessarily few in number and substandard. It looks like Mitsuko Uchida's second recording, which is very highly regarded, is free on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PftH8FVzIRY . Syek88 (talk) 18:33, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia exists to pull out a source and show it to users rather than leave them to search around on their own. This is just a simple case of that. Remember, a lot of us reading are people who don't really remember what Mozart sounds like at all, who open up that YouTube video, listen for a few minutes, flip forward here and there a bit to see how much it seems to change, close it five minutes later, convinced we never heard it before and are unlikely to hear it again. Nonetheless, you're presenting this content for our curiosity, and if perhaps someday we somehow find a deep understanding of what order the notes on a piano should be tapped in we might be back. But only if we remember what it sounded like. Wnt (talk) 19:37, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

I completely accept those points. The trouble is with excerpts is identifying those that are (a) free, (b) of acceptable musical quality, (c) of acceptable sound quality, and (d) uncontroversially interpreted, and then we need to make sure that we aren't serving as a vehicle to promote the individual pianist whose excerpt is used. Frankly I think that is an impossible balancing act to achieve, but perhaps my attitude is too negative. Syek88 (talk) 19:51, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

I believe "acceptable" in this context means "the best someone has found so far". A bad source is better than no source. As for whether they are free, I think that widely circulated YouTube videos can be assumed not to be likely copyright violations. Anything has a chance of being a copyright violation no matter who says they have a right to distribute it, because big highly reputable companies take each other to court all the time, but as long as we don't have a reason to know it's a copyright violation we don't have to try to probe into the mind of whoever is distributing it in the open. Now as for being "used as a vehicle", well, this is inevitable. The people who post free content on the web where we can link to it are rewarded with references, just as those who upload to Commons are rewarded with direct inline links. That's just fair - give us the chance to see you when others do not, you get visibility and they don't. Wnt (talk) 16:03, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't think Youtube videos are necessarily free and we shouldn't be blasė about it. Many record companies now put music up there under licence and derive small returns. Either that or someone is breaching the record company's copyright by putting bootlegs up. The website IMSLP is a much safer course - it hosts genuinely free recordings and scores of a large number of works (for example, Beethoven Op. 57). But they have nothing for this piece, I'm afraid. Syek88 (talk) 19:30, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

I wasn't suggesting the link you gave was CC-licensed or anything like that - but Wikipedia references copyrighted materials on other sites routinely (copying the content here would be a different issue). It's only a question of whether we think it's a pirate copy or not. Anything that has been downloaded some fraction of a million times is unlikely to stay hosted in the U.S. if it's genuinely a case of piracy, since they have those DMCA notices and such. And YouTube goes regrettably very far beyond that, muting audios on pieces based on only the most haphazard allegations, even mass allegations by machine, even when they are made against official sources like NASA. I don't think you should have a moment's worry about the copyright issue; it's simply someone else's problem. Wnt (talk) 22:33, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

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Gould's opinion

I came over to this article just after viewing Glenn Gould's 1968 video "How Mozart Became a Bad Composer." Gould is no fan of Mozart, to say the least, and that video distills his criticisms by tearing apart (or trying to tear apart) a movement of Concerto No. 24. Are his views noteworthy enough to deserve a place in this article? Ishboyfay (talk) 17:56, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

You mean this? It would need a non-trivial amount of summarizing, supplemented by reactions of others to Gould's position, but I think it would make a good addition. Let's wait and see what others think. As this is a featured article, maybe this should be raised at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical music. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:59, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

Yes, that’s the video, although I saw it at a different site. Ishboyfay (talk) 18:48, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

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