None of Mozart's other piano concertos features a larger array of instruments: the work is scored for strings, woodwinds, horns, trumpets and timpani.

24 shortly before the premiere of his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro; the two works are assigned adjacent numbers of 491 and 492 in the Köchel catalogue.

[3] The premiere of the concerto was on either 3 or 7 April 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna; Mozart featured as the soloist and conducted the orchestra from the keyboard.

[a] In 1800, Mozart's widow Constanze sold the original score of the work to the publisher Johann Anton André of Offenbach am Main.

It passed through several private hands during the nineteenth century before Sir George Donaldson, a Scottish philanthropist, donated it to the Royal College of Music in 1894.

[10] There is the occasional notation error in the score, which musicologist Friedrich Blume attributed to Mozart having "obviously written in great haste and under internal strain".

[15] The orchestral exposition, 99 measures long, presents two groups of thematic material, one primary and one secondary, both in the tonic of C minor.

[16] The theme is tonally ambiguous, not asserting the home key of C minor until its final cadence in the thirteenth measure.

[2] The solo exposition follows its orchestral counterpart, and it is here that convention is discarded from the outset: the piano does not enter with the principal theme.

Musicologist Donald Tovey considered this introduction of new material to be "utterly subversive of the doctrine that the function of the opening tutti [the orchestral exposition] was to predict what the solo had to say.

"[18] One hundred measures into the solo exposition, which is now in the relative major of E♭, the piano plays a cadential trill, leading the orchestra from the dominant seventh to the tonic.

[18] The exchange resolves to a passage in which the piano plays a treble line of sixteenth notes, over which the winds add echoes of the main theme.

This transitional passage ultimately modulates to the home key of C minor, bringing about the start of the recapitulation with the conventional re-statement, by the orchestra, of the movement's principal theme.

[21] The wide range of thematic material presented in the orchestral and solo expositions poses a challenge for the recapitulation.

[26] Uniquely among Mozart's concertos, the score does not direct the soloist to end the cadenza with a cadential trill.

The omission of the customary trill is likely to have been deliberate, with Mozart choosing to have the cadenza connect directly to the coda without one.

In this movement, Mozart breaks with convention: the soloist interrupts the tutti with a virtuosic passage of sixteenth notes and accompanies the orchestra through to the final pianissimo C-minor chords.

[32] Donald Tovey refers to the fourth bar, extremely bare and lacking any ornamentation, as "naive", but considers that Mozart intended for it to be so.

[33] After the orchestra repeats the principal theme, there is a very simple bridge or transitional passage that Girdlestone calls "but a sketch" to be ornamented by the soloist, arguing that "to play it as printed is to betray the memory of Mozart".

[34][b] Following the bridge passage, the soloist plays the initial four-measure theme for a second time, before the orchestra commences a new section of the movement, in C minor.

[36] In the middle statement of the principal theme (between the C minor and A♭ major sections), there is a notational error which, in a literal performance of the score, causes a harmonic clash between the piano and the winds.

[37] Alfred Brendel, who has recorded the concerto on multiple occasions, argues that performers should not follow the score literally but correct Mozart's error.

[42] This variation concludes with an extra three-measure passage that culminates in a dominant chord, announcing the arrival of a cadenza.

Girdlestone referred to the "haunting" effect of these chords and stated that the coda ultimately "proclaims with desperation the triumph of the minor mode".

"[43][47] Johannes Brahms also admired the concerto, encouraging Clara Schumann to play it, and wrote his own cadenza for the first movement.

"[45] Referring to the "dark, tragic and passionate" nature of the concerto, Alfred Einstein states that "it is hard to imagine the expression on the faces of the Viennese public" when Mozart premiered the work.

24 is "a climactic and culminating work in Mozart's piano concerto oeuvre, firmly linked to its predecessors, yet decisively transcending them at the same time.