Piano Sonata in F major K.533/494 (1788/1786)

Always pressed for time and often pressed for money, Mozart was not above taking the occasional short cut. One such occasion was in January 1788 when he recycled a Rondo in F he had written eighteen months earlier and added it to a new Allegro in the same key and a new Andante in B flat to complete a three-movement Sonata in F major (now catalogued as K.533/494). This does not mean to say, however, that the composite work - which he promptly sold to his publisher friend Franz Anton Hoffmeister - is casual or inferior in any way. Based on three main themes, the opening Allegro is texturally and harmonically one of the most interesting of all Mozart’s sonata movements - not only in an uncommonly enterprising development section but also in a surprisingly speculative recapitulation which contrives to present the first and third themes together at one point.

Similarly modest thematic material finds itself in even more anomalous situations in the Andante. The tactic Mozart adopts at an early stage in the movement - the first three notes of the opening theme are transferred to the left hand and repeated at different pitch levels to encourage changes of harmony in cascades of broken chords in the right - becomes positively dangerous in the development where it provokes a dramatic, even tortured episode of extreme modulations and intense contrapuntal exchanges. Written just before Mozart’s rediscovery of baroque counterpoint, the comparatively innocent Rondo would have seemed out place here without some adjustment. In the course of recycling it, however, the composer introduced an extraordinary canonic cadenza, rising on a crescendo from one end of the keyboard to the other, just before reverting to the original coda. That did the trick.