[1] Primarily an opera conductor and composer, Weber had only arrived a few months earlier in Munich, where he was extremely well received.
[2] In February 1811, Weber embarked on an international concert tour that was to include such cities as Munich, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Copenhagen, and St.
[4] The Concertino was wildly popular, which caused Maximilian I, the king of Bavaria, immediately to commission from Weber two full clarinet concertos (No.
[4] Many musicians of the court orchestra begged Weber to write concertos for them as well, but the only one who convinced him was the bassoonist Georg Friedrich Brandt.
[5] A student of the famous soloist Georg Wenzel Ritter (Mozart's favorite bassoonist),[6] Brandt convinced the King to commission a bassoon concerto from Weber.
[8] Brandt played the premiere in the Munich Hoftheater on December 28, 1811, but Weber had already left for Switzerland, the next destination on his concert tour.
[7] Weber was able to attend the concert in Prague, and before he sent the concerto to the Berlin publisher Schlesinger in 1822, he made revisions as a result of this hearing.
[11] Chiefly a composer and conductor of operas, Weber had a flair for the theatrical, which he used to great effect to introduce the soloist by the orchestra.
At the end of the introduction the orchestra plays five measures of a cadential six-four while raising a massive crescendo from piano to fortissimo, lands on a root-position dominant seventh chord, then drops out, leaving a solo timpani playing the tonic F at a pianissimo for two measures of alternating eighth notes and eighth rests, creating what Waterhouse calls “theatrical expectancy.”[12] The bassoon enters triumphantly with the first full statement of the movement's militaristic first theme.
[1] Using any technique he can to heighten drama and showcase the virtuosity of the soloist, Weber quickly alternates between notes in very low and very high registers, and right before the flashy arpeggios, scales and trills that lead to the final cadence, the bassoon ascends dramatically to a high D (D5), then the highest note a bassoon could reach.
[20] In a middle section of this movement, the solo bassoon plays in a three part texture with two horns, and the sound is unusual but striking.
We return to the mercurial mood swings of the first movement, alternating dolce and con fuoco sections like before, but with the new markings espressivo and scherzando as well.
Of this spot, Waterhouse states that “devices such as augmentation, fragmentation, [and] hesitation make this return to the main theme perhaps the most witty section of the entire work.”[22] At the end of the piece after the final statement of the theme, the bassoonist engages in a flurry of scales and arpeggios, showing off in one of the bassoon repertoire's flashiest and most virtuosic finales.