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1 Mozart’s Second Thoughts The popular image of Mozart’s music as having sprung into existence fully formed as the miraculous product of genius,as is conveyed in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus and in Milos Forman’s film of the same title,is seriously misleading.While Mozart did not make nearly as many sketches and drafts for his works in progress as did Beethoven,he nevertheless invested much labor in the compositional process,and he was by no means always satisfied with his initial attempts to work out compositions . Mozart not only composed in his head but tried out ideas at the keyboard and made written sketches and drafts, some of which have survived.1 Some scholars have long recognized that the notion of Mozart’s having composed his important works rapidly and without much effort is inaccurate. The debate reaches back to early published writings on Mozart.In the first monograph devoted to Mozart, the book W. A. Mozarts Leben, first published in 1798, Franz Niemetschek wrote concerning Mozart’s creativity of the “incomprehensible ease with which he composed most of his works.”2 On the other hand,Georg Nikolaus Nissen,in his Biographie W. A. Mozarts of 1828,claimed that “one doesn’t believe the gossip at all, according to which he [Mozart] tossed off his significant works swiftly and hurriedly. He carried the main ideas with him for a long time, wrote these down briefly, and worked out the principal matters fully in his head. Only then did he write out the whole,and even then,not as quickly as one has imagined: he carefully improved his work and was extremely strict with himself regarding those compositions that he himself valued.”3 18 chapter 1 The surviving manuscript sources offer confirmation of Nissen’s statement. Mozart often made revealing changes after having devised an initial version of a work. Some glimpses into Mozart’s compositional process are provided by four concerto fragments written on a type of paper also found in the autograph score of his Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488.4 Of particular interest is a fragmentary draft that was presumably intended for the finale of K. 488, a manuscript that is cataloged as K. 488c (Anh. 64).5 Instead of the duple meter of the finale in the finished work, this music is written in 6 8 time; the opening rondo theme shifts between the piano and clarinets in four-measure phrases.Remarkably,this theme has a siciliano rhythm, clearly reminiscent of the slow movement as we know it. In the end, Mozart confined the siciliano idiom to the slow middle movement while devising thematic connections of a rather different kind between the two last movements of the concerto. New insight into Mozart’s revision process emerged as well from the rediscovery of the autograph manuscripts of the Sonata in C Minor,K.457,from 1784 and the Fantasia in C Minor, K. 475, from 1785. In the catalog he kept of his own works, Mozart dated the sonata as “14 October [1784]” and the fantasia as “20 [May 1785].”6 Although the fantasia was composed seven months after the sonata, and the two works were written at separate times on different paper types, Mozart decided in 1785 to join these two pieces in a single publication, and they are also bound together in a manuscript that was long presumed lost but that resurfaced in 1990 at Philadelphia and is now housed at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.7 The fantasia and sonata rank among the greatest achievements in Mozart’s piano music. The dissonant chromaticism of both pieces looks back to J. S. Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer (Musical offering),while in their dramatic concentration they strongly prefigure Beethoven’s famous “C minor mood.” An impressive feature of the fantasia is the way Mozart unifies the form of the whole, with its several sharply contrasting episodes,through a varied return of the opening Adagio at the conclusion.The bare unison octaves of this opening seem to embody an inevitably objective,immovable,even alien reality confronting the player and listener,a sense heightened here by Mozart’s motivic chromaticism,the descent by semitone governing the initial phrases,and his effective use of silence as a rapport of sound with the void. The mysterious opening phrase in unison octaves rises from C and falls back to that pitch, preceding the semitone descent at the outset of m. 2, while the following harmonized phrases and...

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