Rondo in A minor (Mozart)

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WA Mozart, detail from a painting by Johann Nepomuk della Croce (c. 1780)

The Rondo in A minor KV 511 is a piano work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , which he composed in Vienna in March 1787 and with which he responded to the death of a friend. With its gloomy, painful chromatic sound language, the extended couplets and the frequent fluctuations between minor and major , the rondo is one of Mozart's significant and confessional individual pieces.

To the music

The eight-bar theme of the ritornello , reminiscent of a Siciliana , begins with a dotted motif decorated with double strokes on the note e, which is repeated three times. The dark character of the subject is also shaped by the falling interval of the fifth . From bars 2 to 3 it is followed by an ascending chromatic scale from b to e, which ends after the fourth step on a with a descending diatonic scale. In bar 5 Mozart repeats the melody and plays around the chromatic ascent. In the lighter C major episode that follows from bar 9, he replaces the falling fifth of the dotted motif with an upward third and leads back to the main key via the dominant E major .

The first couplet in F major , which also works with chromatic motifs, begins at bar 31 . The shortened ritornello from bar 81 is followed by the second couplet in A major , which works with the double-beat motif and chromatic runs and adds a concertante triplet figure , finally returning to the first theme in bar 129.

The broken chords of the accompaniment from bar 163 illuminate the first theme in a new harmonic way (for example in bar 165 with the opposite sound in F major) and dramatize the action. The triplet movement that begins with bar 173 ends in a coda , which with its intimate accompanying figure reaches the Neapolitan sixth as the climax of the painful expression.

Special features and origins

The chromaticism dominates large parts of the work and extends to the secondary ideas, decorations and couplets. The interweaving of the voices goes beyond the area of ​​piano music into chamber music . The construction of the 182 clocks comprehensive Andante can be roughly described by the scheme ABACA. The first couplet, with its contrapuntal passages and semiquavers, is reminiscent of an invention , the second takes up the rhythm of the Siciliana again, but is pianistically more demanding. Since the theme of the ritornello is increasingly decorated, the rondo sometimes looks like a variation , which is, however, held together by the always formative 6/8 time.

Both couplets are in three parts and could also be viewed as very short sonata main movements. The first instance with a moving from F to C major exposure , a modulating implementation caused by a sudden, the music of Franz Schubert reminiscent fallacy in D flat major strikes and a reprise from bar 54. The ricercarartige chromaticism and Siciliana -Rhythm gives the piece a southern note. With the decorations in the couplets, Mozart draws on the formative first theme.

In a letter to his father from March 1787 he mentioned the biographical reason for the dark composition, the “sad” death of his “dearest best friend Count von Hatzfeld.” Many details of the piece are unusual and give it a special place in Mozart's oeuvre. These include the expressive arpeggios of the accompaniment at the end and the chromatic figures in the middle voice of the first couplet, characteristics that foreshadow the piano music of the Romantic era .

For Hermann Albert and Glenn Stanley, the Rondo shows the "demonic side" of Mozart's being. In comparison with the Rondo in D major KV 485 from 1786, a "gallant, amiable social piece", the listener comes across a personal confession, "from whose spiritual abysses" the harmless predecessor is very far removed.

literature

  • Allen Forte: Generative Chromaticism in Mozart's Music: The Rondo in A Minor, K. 511, The Musical Quarterly 66/4 (1980), pp. 459-483.
  • Marie-Agnes Dittrich: Mozart Handbook , Eds. Silke Leopold , Bärenreiter / Metzler, Stuttgart and Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-476-02077-0 , p. 548

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Günther Batel: Masterpieces of Piano Music , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Variations, Fantasies, Individual Pieces, Fourier Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1997, p. 175
  2. ↑ Harenberg piano music guide, 600 works from the baroque to the present, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Rondo in a minor KV 511 , Meyers, Mannheim 2004, p. 598
  3. ↑ Marie-Agnes Dittrich: Mozart-Handbuch , ed. Silke Leopold, Bärenreiter / Metzler, Stuttgart and Kassel 2005, p. 548
  4. ^ Günther Batel: Masterpieces of Piano Music , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Variations, Fantasies, Single Pieces, Fourier Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1997, p. 176
  5. ↑ Marie-Agnes Dittrich: Mozart-Handbuch , ed. Silke Leopold, Bärenreiter / Metzler, Stuttgart and Kassel 2005, p. 548
  6. ↑ So Marie-Agnes Dittrich: Mozart-Handbuch , ed. Silke Leopold, Bärenreiter / Metzler, Stuttgart and Kassel 2005, p. 548
  7. ↑ Marie-Agnes Dittrich: Mozart-Handbuch , ed. Silke Leopold, Bärenreiter / Metzler, Stuttgart and Kassel 2005, p. 548
  8. ↑ Quoted from: Harenberg piano music guide, 600 works from the baroque to the present, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Rondo in a minor KV 511 , Meyers, Mannheim 2004, p. 598
  9. ^ So Günther Batel: Masterpieces of Piano Music , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Variations, Fantasies, Individual Pieces, Fourier Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1997, p. 176
  10. ↑ Marie-Agnes Dittrich: Mozart-Handbuch , ed. Silke Leopold, Bärenreiter / Metzler, Stuttgart and Kassel 2005, p. 548