March in C major, K.408, No.1

Allemande & Courante (from Suite in C major), K.399

Eine kleine Gigue in G major, K.574

Rondo in A minor, K.511

Nothing written by Mozart in his maturity is negligible. Taking into account only the piano music composed during the last fifteen years of his life, there are a dozen or more pieces which are consistently neglected even so. They are neglected not so much because they are uninteresting or insignificant but rather because, being neither sonatas nor variations, they are difficult to fit into recital programmes - and the shorter they are the more difficult it is. One solution is to make a selection of them, as Richard Goode has done for this occasion, and arrange them in a coherent group.

The March in C is not only a good opener but also a very neatly accomplished compromise between march and sonata form with just a hint of Turkish colouring here and there. Besides, Mozart marches are rare outside his operas. In fact there are only two for piano: the other is the fancifully titled “Marche funèbre del Signor Maestro Contrapunto” in C minor, K453a. This one in C major is actually an arrangement of one of three marches (one of which is now lost) originally written for mixed ensemble in Vienna in 1782. The keyboard version was apparently made for Constanze.

Constanze would also have been pleased by the Suite in C that her husband wrote in the same year. The special interest he took in baroque counterpoint at this time is usually, and not unreasonably, attributed to the influence of Baron van Swieten whose enthusiasm for Handel and J.S. Bach led him to present Sunday morning concerts of their music, sometimes in arrangements by Mozart, in the National Library on the Josephsplatz. But, as Mozart told his father, it was Constanze’s delight in the fugue as a form that led him to complete the first of his keyboard fugues (in C, K.394) in 1782. Although the Handelian Suite in C, which was no doubt intended for Baron van Swieten, was never finished, it does include a French Ouverture (with a fully worked out fugue inC major) as well as the two movements to be performed on this occasion, an authentic Allemande in C minor and a somewhat anachronistic Courante in E flat major.

One of the shortest and most ingenious of all Mozart’s keyboard pieces is the “Little Gigue”in G major which, acccording to the composer’s description in his work list, he inscribed in the “album of Hr. Engel, court organist to the Elector of Saxony in Leipzig” on 16 May 1789. A presumably spontaneous tribute to one Leipzig organist by way of stylstic allusion to another (even though it is said to be closer to the Handel than the Bach model), it comes remarkably near to picking out a twelve-note row in the course of its wickedly mischievous development. Schoenberg seems to have appreciated the point in the Gigue in his Suite, Op.29.

One of the longest and most inspired of all Mozart’s single-movement pieces is the Rondo in A minor, K.511. The second and much the superior of his two piano Rondos - the other, in D major, K.485, was written a year earlier - it is so sadly expressive in the chromatic inflections and the limping not-quite siciliano rhythms of its main theme that there has long been a temptation to associate it with the death of the composer’s father in May 1787. In fact, it was written more than two months before that event. Even so, the choice of the key of A minor (shared by the Sonata, K.310, speculatively associated with the death of Mozart’s mother in Paris in 1778), the serious development of the episodes in F major and A major and the extraordinary last recall of the rondo theme which, dropping its original accompaniment to cast its shadow on figuration from the two episodes, drags its feet in syncopated distortions of its characteristic rhythm in the closing bars… all this seems to suggest a sense of deeply regretted loss.