Kyrie in C (fragment), K. 258a (C major)
av Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s Kyrie in C (fragment), K. 258a, is an unfinished single-movement Mass opening that survives only in a very small autograph source. Although older catalogues sometimes placed it around 1772, the principal online work entry associates the fragment with Mozart’s Vienna years (late 1780s–1791), leaving its original purpose uncertain.
What Is Known
Only a fragmentary Kyrie in C major survives, transmitted as an autograph score of just one written page (a single leaf with one notated side) and described as an uncompleted work. The Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum catalog entry lists the piece as authentic and extant, and gives late dating in Vienna (1786–1791), while also documenting several 19th-century manuscript copies whose titles characterize it as the “beginning of a Mass” with organ solo—suggesting a liturgical context rather than an independent concert Kyrie. The scoring indicated there is festive for so brief a torso: SATB choir with strings (violins I & II) and continuo/organ, plus two clarini (trumpets) and timpani—colors that, in Mozart’s Mass practice, typically signal a celebratory service rather than an everyday setting.[1]
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Musical Content
What survives appears to be the opening gesture of a larger design: a compact choral Kyrie conceived with bright C-major ceremonial sonority (trumpets and timpani) and organ continuo underpinning the vocal writing. Even in fragmentary form, the layout implied by the score—voices integrated with orchestral punctuations rather than merely doubled—points toward Mozart’s mature habit of treating the Mass ordinary as dramatic, public rhetoric, not private devotion. Because the fragment breaks off before any full return or closing cadence can be established, its larger form (whether a straightforward Kyrie–Christe–Kyrie plan or a more through-composed solution) cannot be securely reconstructed from the surviving page alone.[1]
[1] Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Köchel-Verzeichnis work entry for K. 258a: status/authenticity, dating, instrumentation, and source description (“Autograph, 1787 … 1 Bl.”) plus later copies.