Is There a Role for Moral Choice in a Mozart Piano Concerto?

The paper introduces moral choice as a music analytical tool. This is based on an analogy between an 18th century person’s moral choice and the change from a ritornello section to a solo section and vice versa in a Mozart piano concerto. The anthropomorphic nature of this change between actors is highlighted through a self-fashioning behavior of theme-actors that represent 18th-century moral sentiments. The paper launches the idea of using the framework of changing morality as a way to analyze large-scale alteration between soloist and orchestra. Using existential semiotic theory, the idea of moral dialogue between self-fashioning actors is transferred from cultural poetics to music analysis of concerto discourse. In the concerto KV 467 this results in a narrative trajectory that traverses from pride through humility to benevolence. In this process the interpretation of moral sentiment of pride changes from ancient regime pride to the idealized pride of the Enlightenment.