Recent DNA tests on a human skull preserved at the Salzburg Mozart-eum have failed to establish that these bones were ever part of the great Mozart. My own efforts to “get inside the composer’s skull” have been engendered by the question “What was Mozart thinking” when he abandoned the writing of the keyboard Fantasia in D minorr, K. 397 at an unresolved dominant seventh chord? Anecdote informs us of this composer jumping up from a deep sleep in order to resolve a dissonance, yet it was with an incomplete cadence that his manuscript ended, and it was this document that provided a text for the first publication of the Fantasia in 1804, nearly a decade and a half after Mozart’s death. [Published by the Bureau d’Arts et d’Industrie, Vienna, this earliest printing was first mentioned in Köchel Catalog 3 in 1937]. However, only two years later in volume 17 of the “complete works of Mozart” [Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel] the piece had acquired ten additional measures, providing a perfectly proper “Mozartian” ending, most likely supplied by the incumbent Leipzig Thomaskantor and Mozart aficionado, August Eberhard Müller. [Information about these early editions is from Paul Hirsch’s article, cited in the Bibliography.]
I have played this particular Mozart work for more than half a century, first on the piano, and, more recently, at the harpsichord. Like every other player, I had always used the standard edition, not knowing enough to question its total authenticity. But a little knowledge may, indeed, be liberating (or dangerous), and I have enjoyed a quest to craft a more individual ending for this favorite work during this anniversary year.
Mozart’s final decade saw both dramatic and contrapuntal development in the young master’s works. He made the acquaintance of another, older, genius—Christoph Willibald von Gluck, recently returned to Vienna from stellar operatic successes in Paris. In several letters, Mozart writes of attending nearly all the rehearsals for the German language premiere of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, during October 1781. Here was a work of striking novelty and dramatic intensity, beginning immediately with an arresting Overture that moves seamlessly from music of classical serenity to the scene-setting storm, and on to a most surprising choral interjection—new music, new dramatic pacing for opera in Vienna, in a work that Mozart knew intimately.
The key of the Fantasia might give some indication that a more startling ending should be forthcoming. After all D minor IS the home key of Mozart’s greatest opera, Don Giovanni [1787]—another work of forward-looking musical invention, including, close to the end, an absolutely astonishing foretaste of Schoenberg, when all of the twelve chromatic pitches occur within six fast-paced measures during the music of the Statue’s dinner invitation to the dissolute Don! [Pointed out to Luigi Dallapiccola by Darius Milhaud. See Dallapiccola on Opera, page 211.]
Leaving off conjecture and speculation, fascinating as they are, I turned to Mozart’s additional published keyboard fantasias, and noted that the fourth Fantasia (K. 475) concludes with a return to its opening measures. So, why not follow that dominant seventh chord in K. 397 with a return to the arpeggiated chords of the beginning? For me, this has proved to be a more satisfying musical solution. One simply follows the A-Major dominant seventh chord with a repetition of measures one through eight, adding an improvised cadence on the D-minor 6/4 chord, and ending in the tonic key of D minor. (See Example 1)
Of course there are other possibilities! The title of that first publication in 1804 read “Fantaisie d’Introduction.” Perhaps Mozart planned to follow his fantasy with a fugue, as he did in a subsequent composition from this same period, the Fantasy and Fugue in C Major, K. 394.
In an excerpt from this letter to his sister Nannerl, the composer writes about his composition (Vienna, 20 April 1782): . . . My dear [fiancée] Constanze is really the cause of this fugue’s coming into the world. Baron von Swieten, to whom I go every Sunday, gave me all the works of Handel and Sebastian Bach to take home with me (after I had played them to him). When Constanze heard the fugues, she absolutely fell in love with them. Now she will listen to nothing but fugues, and particularly . . . the works of Handel and Bach. Well, as she had often heard me play fugues out of my head, she asked me if I had ever written any down, and when I said I had not, she scolded me roundly for not recording some of my compositions in this most artistic and beautiful of all musical forms and never ceased to entreat me until I wrote down a fugue for her. So this is its origin. [Translation by Emily Anderson, in Blom, p. 192.] A unique bit of courtship, perhaps, but a wonderfully worked out contrapuntal addition to the Mozart keyboard literature, and one that works equally well transposed up a step. In D Major it serves as yet another possibility for a 66-measure extension to Mozart’s Fantaisie d’Introduction in D minor . . . (See Example 2)
Should this solution be chosen, Mozart’s advice on the proper tempi for fugues is salutary: I have purposely written above it Andante maestoso, as it must not be played too fast. For if a fugue is not played slowly, the ear cannot clearly distinguish the theme when it comes in and consequently the effect is entirely missed . . . [From the letter to Nannerl, cited above.]
When I add the transposed Fugue to the Fantasia I round it off with the return to the original D-minor opening, as previously suggested.
May these pieces be played on a harpsichord? Should they be played on a harpsichord? That question has been argued for decades. Perhaps, yet again, we might allow the composer to weigh in on this topic.
Writing to his father Leopold, from Vienna, 27 June 1781:
We have TWO harpsichords [cembali] in the house where I am lodging, one for galanterie [dance] playing and the other an instrument which is strung with the lower octave throughout, like one we had in London, and consequently [it] sounds like an organ. So on this one I improvised and played fugues. [Anderson, page 748].
While many still argue that cembalo is a generic term for keyboard, I think on the evidence of these 1781 comments from Wolfgang Amadeus himself, we may accept that, at least in this specific reference, cembali refers to harpsichords. (We know, further, that the London instrument played by the nine-year-old Mozart was made by Burkat Shudi. [Diary of Leopold Mozart, probably July 1765; cited in Boalch, p. 174.])
What was Mozart thinking? We will never know for certain, but we may continue to search for clues in the music he heard and in the music he wrote. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote [Letters to a Young Poet (1903)]:
Be patient with all that is unsolved . . .
And try to love the questions themselves . . .
Thanks to Clyde Putman for Finale versions of the musical examples, and to Jane Johnson for her evocative Mozart drawing.
