Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Fantasie in f-Moll für Klavier

Wolfgang Amadé Mozart notated the 14-bar fragment on a leaf, the reverse of which contains sketches for the finale of the second act of the opera Così fan tutte, a fact which suggests a date of 1789. Although the leaf has been lost since around the mid-1930s, a good copy has survived. The conspicuously neat notation suggests that Mozart was preparing to write a work that was already largely conceived, although he seems to have abruptly interrupted his work on it: In the last year of his life, he composed a related work in the same key: the Fantasia for mechanical organ K. 608, which - despite all the differences to the present fragment - possibly realized the idea of the work envisaged for the composer in the piano fantasy fragment.

The grave beginning in Adagio tempo is reminiscent of the Piano Fantasy in C minor K. 475. Despite its brevity, the fragment includes not only the main theme, which leads to a semi-finale, but also the secondary movement in the parallel major key of A flat major, entitled dolce. Based on K. 475, I took account of this brief "sonata exposition" in my addition with a corresponding "recapitulation" (mm. 149ff.), whereby the secondary movement is now in the main key as normal. In the variety of contrasting sections from m. 28 onwards, I was guided by the procedures in Mozart's surviving fantasias. In particular, the presumed conceptual proximity to K. 608 led me to integrate a fugue (mm. 76-144), also dramatically interrupted (but here in three voices), on an original theme.

Uri Rom