Piano Sonata No. 18 in D major, K. 576 (“The Hunt”)
ヴォルフガング・アマデウス・モーツァルト作
Mozart’s Piano Sonata in D major, K. 576—entered in his own thematic catalogue in July 1789—is the last piano sonata he completed, and among the most exacting he ever wrote for the keyboard [1]. Conceived under the outward label of an “easy” Prussian commission, it instead fuses crystalline Classicism with an almost didactic delight in counterpoint, testing a pianist’s touch, clarity, and stamina at every turn [2].
Background and Context
In 1789 Mozart was 33, living in Vienna, and navigating a precarious financial moment shadowed by the Austro–Turkish War’s strain on the imperial economy and on private patronage. In mid-July he wrote yet another appeal to his friend and fellow Freemason Johann Michael von Puchberg, describing plans meant to generate income through publication: “six easy keyboard sonatas” for Princess Friederike of Prussia and “six quartets for the King,” to be engraved “by Kozeluch” at his own expense [2]. The letter is revealing not only as biography but as a window onto Mozart’s late-Vienna working ecology—composition tied tightly to engraving, marketing, and the hope of a dependable market beyond the Viennese concert season.
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K. 576 belongs to that same Prussian horizon. Mozart had traveled in 1789 through northern Germany and to Berlin/Potsdam, where King Friedrich Wilhelm II—a keen amateur cellist—was associated with the later “Prussian” string quartets, K. 575, 589, and 590. The sonata is habitually linked with the projected set for the King’s daughter, Princess Friederike, as Mozart’s July letter suggests [2]. Yet the resulting work is famously not “easy.” This mismatch has become one of the sonata’s most productive interpretive puzzles: was Mozart redefining “easy” to mean “transparent in texture,” or did he write something that flattered a princess with unusually high-level musical training? The sources do not settle the matter; what they do show is Mozart thinking like a composer-entrepreneur—packaging “useful” keyboard music for a courtly market while still pursuing his own most exacting craft.
Composition
The Sonata in D for clavier, K. 576, is dated to July 1789 in the New Mozart Edition’s presentation of the sonatas, which draws on Mozart’s own entry describing it as “a sonata for piano alone” [1]. That self-description is more pointed than it might seem. By 1789 the Viennese market was saturated with mixed domestic genres—keyboard pieces with optional violin, simplified arrangements, and pedagogical sets—so Mozart’s insistence on “piano alone” stakes out a certain seriousness of design.
The documentary anchor remains the Puchberg letter of 14 July 1789, where Mozart presents the sonatas and quartets as a coordinated publication venture, with Koželuch’s involvement in engraving explicitly mentioned [2]. That plan did not unfold as described: while the “Prussian” quartets emerged over the next year, only one “easy” sonata appears to have been completed—K. 576.
A further complication—and a reminder of how much Mozart scholarship must sometimes reconstruct from gaps—is the loss of the autograph manuscript (often noted in modern reference accounts). This makes early printed and copied sources unusually significant for details of articulation and dynamics, and it helps explain why editorial traditions around the work can diverge in small but meaningful ways (slurs, staccato patterns, and phrasing that directly shape the sonata’s “hunting” rhetoric and its contrapuntal legibility). The Köchel Verzeichnis entry provides the basic identity data and source overview for the work as part of the established catalogue record [3].
Form and Musical Character
K. 576 is in three movements, outwardly conventional for a late Mozart piano sonata, yet internally full of intentional friction: brilliance versus strictness, singing line versus instrumental “sport,” and the public D-major profile versus moments of private harmonic sidestepping.
- I. Allegro (D major)
- II. Adagio (A major)
- III. Allegretto (D major)
I. Allegro — sonata-allegro form as contrapuntal theatre
The opening movement is often admired for its clean, athletic surface—one reason for the nickname “The Hunt,” widely attached to the sonata in modern reception [4]. But the deeper story is how Mozart engineers that surface through two-voice craft that is at once strict and playful.
Rather than relying on thick chordal rhetoric, Mozart frequently writes in lean textures where the pianist must project independent lines with equal clarity. This leanness is not austerity: it is a way of making every interval count. The listener hears “horn calls” and open-air D-major brightness; the performer feels a kind of continuous exposed writing, where even small smudges in voice-leading blur the argument.
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What makes the movement unusually “late” is how the counterpoint functions structurally. Instead of being ornamental (a brief fugal display), imitative and invertible figures become a primary method of developing motives across the exposition and especially the development. In effect, Mozart turns sonata-allegro form (exposition, development, recapitulation) into a laboratory for invertible textures—music that can be “turned” and still speak.
II. Adagio — singing line under glass
The Adagio in A major offers the most sustained cantabile writing of the sonata, but it is not a simple lyrical respite. Its serenity is built on controlled pacing, long-range harmonic breathing, and the kind of carefully spaced dissonance that rewards slow listening. In performance, this movement is where the fortepiano question becomes more than antiquarian.
On an eighteenth-century Viennese fortepiano, the lighter action and quicker decay encourage a vocal kind of legato—phrasing that must be actively “spoken” because it cannot be sustained by sheer sound. On a modern concert grand, the danger is the opposite: the line can become too continuous, too upholstered, obscuring the movement’s rhetorical punctuation. The result is that interpretive debates around K. 576 often hinge not on tempo alone, but on what “singing” means when the instrument itself has changed.
III. Allegretto — wit, balance, and learned craft
The finale’s Allegretto is sometimes described as a genial rondo, yet its cheerfulness masks an intricate web of dialogue between hands. Here Mozart’s virtuosity is less about speed than about quick changes of character—tiny shifts from “outdoors” brightness to an almost chamber-music intimacy.
The finale also clarifies a broader point about the sonata’s difficulty. K. 576 is hard not because it is densely notated, but because it demands continuous control: of articulation, of inner voices, of balance at the moment the texture flips from melody-with-accompaniment to near-equality of parts. In this sense, the sonata is a late statement of Mozart’s ideal keyboard style—lucid, proportioned, and unsparing.
Reception and Legacy
Because K. 576 is Mozart’s last completed piano sonata, later pianists and critics have often treated it as a kind of summation—an emblem of “classical clarity” at the very end of the genre’s eighteenth-century flowering. Yet its legacy is just as much pedagogical as concert-historical: it became a touchstone for what is sometimes called “clean virtuosity,” where brilliance is inseparable from voice-leading.
The sonata’s reception history also reflects a persistent misunderstanding: the word “easy” in Mozart’s July 1789 letter has tempted generations to frame K. 576 as an anomaly—an unexpectedly difficult piece that somehow slipped into a commission meant for a princess [2]. A more musically plausible reading is that Mozart was aiming for a transparent idiom—music that looks simple on the page because it avoids thick textures, but which becomes difficult precisely because everything is exposed.
Today K. 576 remains a proving ground for pianists who want to demonstrate not only polish but understanding: of eighteenth-century articulation, of the expressive role of counterpoint, and of how a “public” key like D major can contain private, inward turns without losing composure. In short, it is both a brilliant sonata and a document of late Mozartian craft—where the highest art is achieved by making complexity appear effortless.
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楽譜
Piano Sonata No. 18 in D major, K. 576 (“The Hunt”)の楽譜をVirtual Sheet Music®からダウンロード・印刷
[1] Digital Mozart Edition (Neue Mozart-Ausgabe): Keyboard Sonatas, includes K. 576 with dating and catalogue context.
[2] Digital Mozart Edition: Mozart letter to Johann Michael von Puchberg, 14 July 1789 (English translation), mentioning six ‘easy’ keyboard sonatas for Princess Friederike and six quartets for the King.
[3] Köchel Verzeichnis (Mozarteum): KV 576 work entry (Sonata in D for clavier), catalogue data and sources overview.
[4] Wikipedia: overview article on Piano Sonata No. 18 in D major, K. 576 (including common nickname usage and general reception notes).