Piano Concerto No. 26 (Mozart) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

While this concerto has enjoyed popularity due to its beauty and rococo (or galant) style, it is not generally regarded today to be of the level of quality of the twelve previous Viennese piano concertos or the final concerto in B flat. This amounts to a complete reversal of critical opinion, since K. 537 was once one of Mozart's most celebrated keyboard concertos, especially during the 19th century. In 1935, Friedrich Blume, editor of the Eulenburg edition of this work, called it "the best known and most frequently played" of Mozart's piano concertos. But writing in 1945, Einstein commented:

...It is very Mozartean, while at the same time it does not express the whole or even the half of Mozart. It is, in fact, so 'Mozartesque' that one might say that in it Mozart imitated himself—no difficult task for him. It is both brilliant and amiable, especially in the slow movement; it is very simple, even primitive, in its relation between the solo and the tutti, and so completely easy to understand that even the nineteenth century always grasped it without difficulty....

Nonetheless, the "Coronation" concerto remains today frequently performed.