Rondo in A minor (Mozart)
Mozart recorded the completion of the Rondo in his personal thematic catalog on 11 March 1787;[a] he was age 31 at the time and had only recently returned from a triumphant journey to Prague, where he witnessed great success for a new production of his 1786 opera The Marriage of Figaro, for his Symphony No.
[4] Simon Keefe even suggests that the Rondo was not created through ordinary musical composition but rather was improvised on the spot, perhaps before an audience in Prague during his trip there (January–February 1787), or at a Vienna concert on 11 February 1787.
Aside from Keefe's suggestion above, a different guess is entertained by Scheideler: "Since subscription [i.e., benefit] concerts of two of [Mozart's] musician friends took place shortly after he completed the work (that of the oboist Friedrich Ramm on 14 March and of the bass singer Ludwig Karl Fischer on 21 March), and works by Mozart were ascertainably performed there ... it seems plausible to assume that the Rondo in A minor was also given its first performance at one of these concerts.
[8] Later in 1787 (17 October), an advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung announced that manuscript copies of the Rondo (price 1 florin) were available from the copyist Johann Traeg, who had previously issued three of Mozart's piano concertos.
[9] Traeg frequently produced unauthorized copies of composers' works; there is no evidence whether or not his version the Rondo was created with Mozart's cooperation.
Following the last appearance of "A" there is a coda that draws on the music for A as well as a minor key version of C. Each of the five major sections is itself structured.
[11] The work abounds in chromatic passages (i.e., involving closely spaced notes drawn from outside the set of pitches of the keynote scale).
The transitions from "B" and "C" back to "A" are in free form and bear the hallmarks of a fantasia or concerto cadenza, with rapid modulations to new keys, "drifting arpeggios and diminished harmonies".
[13] In bars 134–135, the rising sequence of the main theme receives a particularly intense form of ornamentation: every note is trilled.
The reason is that many other works of Mozart are notated quite sparely, with nothing like the layers of ornamentation he added onto the repetitions of the main theme of the Rondo in A Minor.
To help make this point, Levin juxtaposes all ten appearances of the Rondo's main motif in musical notation, illustrating the striking variety of decoration and restatement that Mozart achieved.
[g][h] The Mozart scholar Hermann Abert offered a warm appreciation of the work: it "is one of the most important keyboard rondos ever composed.
With its exotically tinged theme, it is a typically Mozartian piece in A minor, its first four bars, with their characteristic chromaticisms and dynamics, revealing an impassioned tension that is maintained through the whole movement, without ever achieving any resolution in an optimistic sense".
"[18] Richard Wigmore takes the despair theme a step further, following a longstanding tradition in Mozart biography.Keefe (2017), pp.
"[19] Vladimir Horowitz disagreed with the "despair" interpretation and cautioned in particular against letting it lead to dragging the tempo in performance.
His remarks on the work were recorded by David Dubal: "People today think that slow playing means profound ... [Horowitz approached the piano and continued.]
