Output details

Completion of Mozart Piano Trio Fragment K.442 [Konrad: Fr1785e]

This edition and completion of Mozart’s fragmentary movement for piano 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. Its autograph manuscript, in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz Musikabteilung, is notated on a single leaf of a paper type that also appears in manuscripts that can be securely dated from the autumn of 1785 to the summer of 1791 (see NMA X:33/2, pp 39–40). Other fragmentary works on this paper type date from 1789–91 and the editor believes that the spare style of K. 442, coupled with the physical evidence of the manuscript, also points to a late date of composition.

The submitted completion is based on the view that the fragment dates from 1789 at the earliest. An alternative completion, postulating a slightly earlier-style solution to the movement’s conclusion, is on the Mozart Fragments Project website.

The first public performance of the submitted completion takes place on 28 January 2014 by the Trio Cardinale.

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