Output details

Completion of Mozart String Trio Fragment K.562e [Konrad: Fr1789g]

This edition and completion of Mozart’s fragmentary movement for a String Trio forms part of the ongoing ‘Mozart Fragments Project’ at the Royal Academy of Music (www.ram.ac.uk/mozartfragments). This project takes as its starting point the revised dating of many of Mozart’s fragments (drawing on the work of Ulrich Konrad and Alan Tyson), together with the editor’s own research on Mozart’s working methods in the last six years of his life, and the editor’s analytical research towards a forthcoming monograph on the reciprocities of Mozart’s late instrumental music. The project aims to provide editions of selected fragments with alternative versions of the completions, in an attempt to explore the contingent compositional choices that faced Mozart at the moment where the notation of the fragment broke off.

The date of this fragment is disputed. K6 speculated on a date of September 1788; but the autograph manuscript, in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, is notated on two leaves whose paper types are elsewhere overwhelmingly found in the manuscripts of works that can be securely dated to 1791 (see NMA X:33/2, pp 46–7). Mozart’s fragment breaks off near the start of the development section at a point where the composer had committed to the development’s tonal trajectory but not yet to its motivic substance. Three different solutions to this problem can be found on the Mozart Fragments Project Website. The submitted solution takes as its starting point the mono-motivic, single-span development sections that are common in Mozart’s very late instrumental music.

The first public performance of the submitted completion takes place on 5 February 2014 by the Lang Trio.

The submission takes the form of a score and a CD recording.