Basset Horn Concerto in G (fragment), K. 584b
av Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s Basset Horn Concerto in G (fragment), K. 584b, is a surviving concerto movement sketch from Vienna (1787), probably conceived for the basset horn within his close circle of wind players. In its few preserved pages, one glimpses the mature concerto style of Mozart at age 31—lyric, theatrically paced, and already pointing toward the sound-world later associated with his clarinet writing.
What Is Known
Only a fragment of a concerto movement for basset horn and orchestra survives under the Köchel number K. 584b, generally dated to Vienna, 1787.[1] The work is transmitted as an incomplete autograph sketch rather than a finished, fully orchestrated concerto; no complete multi-movement work is extant.[1]
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Because Mozart wrote intensively for clarinets and basset horns in these years (not least for friends in Viennese musical circles), scholars have often connected K. 584b with the instrument’s virtuoso milieu—sometimes naming Anton Stadler as a plausible point of contact, though the surviving sources do not allow a definitive dedication or premiere context.[2]
Musical Content
What remains reads like the opening span of a concerto first movement: an orchestral framework that clears space for a cantabile solo line, with the basset horn treated as a lyric protagonist rather than a mere coloristic obbligato.[2] The fragment’s writing favors smooth stepwise melody and long-breathed phrase structure—idiomatic for an extended low clarinet-family instrument—while hinting at the dialogic concerto rhetoric Mozart had refined throughout the 1780s.[1]
[1] Mozarteum Köchel catalogue entry for KV 584b (concerto movement in G for basset horn and orchestra; fragment; dating and basic work data).
[2] Colin Lawson, Cambridge University Press (chapter “Mozart’s original text”): discussion of the surviving autograph sketch for basset horn in G and its status as a primary source for this unfinished concerto text.