Movement to a Piano Quartet in E♭ major (original finale to K. 493), K. 493a
di Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s Movement to a Piano Quartet in E♭ major (K. 493a) is an authentic but uncompleted fragment, apparently drafted in Vienna between April and June 1786, when the composer was 30. Preserved in autograph score on a single leaf, it seems to represent an abandoned attempt at the finale for the Piano Quartet in E♭, K. 493.
Background and Context
In Vienna in the spring of 1786, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was at the height of his chamber-music assurance, writing for the new, quasi-concertante medium of piano with string trio. The surviving Quartet movement in E♭ (K. 493a) is dated by the Mozarteum’s work catalogue to April–June 1786 and is explicitly scored for clavier (piano), violin, viola, and violoncello—matching the ensemble of the finished Piano Quartet in E♭, K. 493.[1]
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What remains is brief: an autograph score of just one leaf (two written pages). The Neue Mozart-Ausgabe includes it in an appendix as the “original draft for the last movement” of K. 493, underscoring its function as a discarded finale rather than an independent, circulating piece.[2]
Musical Character
Because K. 493a survives only as a fragment, its overall design can only be inferred. Still, even in miniature it suggests Mozart thinking “finale”: the texture is led by a busy, articulate keyboard line, with the strings supplying replies, doublings, and conversational counterpoints typical of his mature Viennese piano chamber style. Heard against the published Allegretto finale of K. 493, K. 493a reads as a workshop alternative—an attempt at motion and closure in the same luminous E♭-major sound world, but left behind before Mozart committed to the movement we now know.[1]
[1] Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, KV Online — work entry for K. 493a (dating, key, instrumentation, source description).
[2] Digital Mozart Edition (DME) / Neue Mozart-Ausgabe — table of contents for NMA VIII/22/1 showing K. 493a as “Original draft for the last movement of K. 493” (appendix).