Mozart lost no time looking up his old friend and horn virtuoso Joseph Leutgeb (c. 1745–1811) when he settled in Vienna in 1781. Mozart had known Leutgeb as the principal horn in the Salzburg court orchestra, and, though Leutgeb was now working in his wife’s family’s cheese business in Vienna, he continued to play the horn publicly until at least 1792. As early as 1777, when he transferred to Vienna, Leutgeb had asked Mozart for a horn concerto, but it wasn’t until the composer himself moved to Vienna that he wrote the first of his several works for horn and orchestra. In fact his first Viennese composition, though not a concerto, was the Rondo for horn and orchestra, K. 371, dated March 21, 1781, in his own catalog of works. Mozart loved to tease and ridicule Leutgeb, consequently some of the manuscripts he wrote for him are full of sarcastic comments and playful jibes. Despite Mozart’s oft-reported insensitivity to Leutgeb, they remained close friends to the end.

The works Mozart wrote for Leutgeb stand as the true testament not only to their friendship but to the horn player’s skills. Mozart composed his concertos for the hand horn (or natural horn), which had no valves to produce notes that did not occur naturally in the instrument’s harmonic series. These notes could be elicited only by pressing the hand into the bell, something regular orchestral players were not usually required to do, but which solo and chamber music players had to master in order to fill in the full range of notes. These “stopped” notes produce a different tone quality, which Mozart naturally took into consideration, but he was well aware that he could write virtuosically for the horn because of Leutgeb’s abilities. All the works Mozart wrote for Leutgeb—the Quintet K. 386c (K. 407) for horn and strings, several concertos, some fragmentary compositions, and probably the above-mentioned Rondo—admirably display the horn player’s spectrum from vivacious to lyrical playing.

The three complete Horn Concertos, K. 417, 447, and 495, all in E-flat major, are misleadingly known as Nos. 2, 3, and 4 because a two-movement work in D major had erroneously been assigned “No. 1,” and K. 447 had been thought to have been composed before the present work, K. 495. The date of this piece, actually the second of the complete concertos, has never been in doubt, for Mozart entered it into his catalog on June 26, 1786, describing it as “A hunting horn concerto for Leutgeb.”

Composed just two months after Mozart had completed The Marriage of Figaro, the Horn Concerto not only revels in hunting-horn idioms (last movement), but also exhibits the juxtaposition of elegant melodic bustle and tenderness. The manuscript shows Mozart’s cheerful state of mind in writing for his friend: he employs a variety of different colored inks—black, red, blue, and green. Among the notable aspects of the first movement, the most extended in all the horn concertos, is the soloist’s adoption of the long-note theme of the oboes as the main theme rather than the rhythmic violin melody. The “early” entrance of the soloist is also unusual as is the reordering of the materials in the recapitulation and the additional appearance of the soloist after the cadenza.

The slow movement would have shown off Leutgeb’s renowned lyrical playing admirably. It was reported about his solo playing in Paris in the Mercure de France in 1770 that he could “sing an adagio as perfectly as the most mellow, interesting, and accurate voice.” The main theme shows a striking similarity to that of the slow movement (also in B-flat major) of the four-hand Piano Sonata, K. 497, which Mozart completed just over one month after K. 495. The finale, perhaps the most familiar of the composer’s “hunting horn” finales, consists of a rousing rondo in 6/8 meter, replete with horn fanfares.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe