- Köchel Number
- K9 383b | K6
- Genre
- Piano Music
- Form
- Piano Pieces
- Key
- F Major
- Date
- 1782
- Place
- Vienna
- Age
- 26
Mozart’s Fugue for Piano in F major (K. 383b) is a short, fragmentary essay in strict counterpoint, generally dated to Vienna in 1782, when the composer was 26. Though modest in scale, it belongs to the same Viennese moment in which Mozart was intensifying his study of Baroque-style polyphony and experimenting with learned textures at the keyboard.
Background and Context
In 1782, newly settled in Vienna, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was consolidating his career as a freelance composer-pianist and absorbing a wide spectrum of styles—from fashionable keyboard brilliance to the more “learned” contrapuntal idiom he encountered in Viennese circles devoted to Bach and Handel. K. 383b, a fugue in F major transmitted as a fragment, is typically placed in this period and is often described in catalogues as a brief keyboard fugue rather than a finished concert piece [1] [2].
Musical Character
On the page, K. 383b presents a compact fugal texture in F major: a single subject is introduced and then taken up by additional voices in close imitation, creating the characteristic dovetailing entries and steady contrapuntal momentum associated with the Baroque fugue. Because the work survives only incompletely, its larger tonal itinerary and intended concluding stretto (tightened, overlapping entries) cannot be securely described; what remains, however, shows Mozart thinking in cleanly articulated lines rather than in the melody-and-accompaniment rhetoric of much contemporary keyboard writing [2] [3].
Sources
[1] Wikipedia: Köchel catalogue entry listing K. 383b as a Fugue for piano in F (fragment), dated to spring 1782, Vienna.
[2] IMSLP: "Fugue in F major, K.Anh.33" page (work listing and access to public-domain scores/editions where available).
[3] PianoLibrary.org: work overview page "Fugue in F major, KV Anh. 33 = Anh. 40/383b" with references to NMA volume information.