Chamber Music with Piano (Fragment) in C (K. 387c) — Fragmentary Sketch
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s Chamber Music with Piano (fragment), K. 387c, is an uncompleted keyboard-led ensemble sketch from his Vienna years (dated 1784–86) and survives only as a single-page autograph. Long mischaracterized in older catalogues, it is now most plausibly understood as a chamber-music movement rather than a concerto fragment.
What Is Known
K. 387c survives as a brief autograph fragment—29 measures—and is preserved as an extant but uncompleted work in the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum’s Köchel-Verzeichnis entry.[1] Although sometimes described (in earlier reference traditions) as belonging to a piano concerto, the New Mozart Edition commentary considers that description “certainly wrongly” applied, and argues that “chamber music movement” is the more accurate identification.[2]
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The same Mozarteum entry gives the most concrete clues about intended forces: keyboard (clavier), two horns, two violins, and bass—a combination associated with the broader late-18th-century Klavierdivertimento / early trio traditions, though Mozart appears only to have experimented with the type here.[1][2] The fragment is dated to Vienna, 1784–86, i.e., Mozart at roughly age 28–30, during the period when his public career as pianist-composer was at full momentum.[1]
Musical Content
With only 29 bars surviving, K. 387c reads less like a fully laid-out chamber movement than a starter paragraph: an opening idea and its immediate continuation, sufficient to suggest a projected formal span but not enough to confirm a complete exposition or a finished thematic plan. The scoring implied by the source description (keyboard with strings and horns) points toward the Viennese sound-world of Mozart’s mid-1780s, where the piano typically leads and the accompanying parts articulate harmony, color, and rhythmic profile—yet the fragment breaks off before any larger design can become unmistakable.[1][2]
[1] Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Köchel-Verzeichnis entry for KV 387c (status, dating, and source description including instrumentation; notes fragment as extant/uncompleted).
[2] Digital Mozart Edition / New Mozart Edition (NMA) VIII/22/2, English preface/commentary discussing the 29-measure autograph fragment KV Appendix 55 (= K. 387c / K6 452b) and rejecting the older ‘piano concerto fragment’ description in favor of ‘chamber music movement’.