Movement to a Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 537b)
ヴォルフガング・アマデウス・モーツァルト作
Mozart’s Movement to a Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 537b) is a short, fragmentary concerto movement drafted in Vienna in 1788, when the composer was 32. Preserved only in incomplete form, it is usually discussed in connection with the contemporaneous Piano Concerto No. 26 in D major, K. 537.
Background and Context
Mozart wrote K. 537b in Vienna in 1788, the same year he completed the Piano Concerto No. 26 in D major, K. 537 (24 February 1788). The surviving music is not a complete concerto movement in performing form; rather, it appears to be an abandoned start or an alternative idea that later became associated with K. 537 in cataloguing and editions.[1][2])
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In stylistic terms, its choice of D minor is striking within Mozart’s late piano-concerto output—more readily recalling the dramatic rhetoric of the earlier Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 than the festive D-major world of the “Coronation” Concerto.[3])
Musical Character
The music that survives is extremely brief (often described as only a few dozen bars), so broad formal claims would be overstated. What can be said from its notated state is that Mozart was sketching a concerto opening in D minor with solo piano and orchestra implied, but without the extended orchestral tutti and the large-scale tonal plan one expects in a finished first movement.[1]
Even in this truncated form, the minor-key premise suggests a more urgent, theatrical stance than K. 537 proper: a world of tense unisons, emphatic harmonic turns, and the kind of restless momentum Mozart often uses to launch dramatic movements (a profile familiar from K. 466).[3])
Place in the Catalog
In the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, K. 537b is printed among the concerto fragments appended to the volume containing K. 537 and K. 595—an editorial placement that underscores its status as a surviving torso rather than an independent, concert-ready work.[1]
[1] IMSLP: contents list for the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe volumes showing K.Anh.61/537b as a concerto fragment appended to the K.537/K.595 volume (p.198).
[2] Wikipedia: Piano Concerto No. 26 in D major, K. 537 (completion date and general work context).
[3] Wikipedia: Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 (reference point for Mozart’s D-minor concerto rhetoric).