- Köchel Number
- K9 642 | K6
- Genre
- Opera & Stage Music
- Form
- Arias, Scenes, Ensembles & Choirs
- Date
- 1767
- Place
- Olomouc
- Age
- 11
Mozart’s Aria for Nepomucena Wolff (K. 642) is a lost vocal piece, apparently written in Olomouc in late 1767, when the composer was 11. With no surviving music and only brief catalogue testimony, it sits on the fringes of the canon as a work of doubtful or uncertain authenticity.
Mozart’s Life at the Time
In November–December 1767, the Mozart family was in Olomouc (Moravia) during a difficult stretch of travel in Central Europe, and the 11-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was still producing occasional occasional pieces connected to local performers and patrons.1 The Köchel catalogue entry associates the now-lost aria with a singer named Nepomucena Wolff, suggesting a practical, performer-specific commission or gift rather than a work for publication.12
Musical Character
No score or text for K. 642 is known to survive, and published catalogue records do not preserve even a musical incipit; consequently, details such as key, instrumentation beyond “solo voice,” and formal design cannot be described securely.12 If the attribution is correct, the aria would nonetheless belong to the period when Mozart was rapidly absorbing Italianate vocal style—clear periodic phrasing, singable melodic contour, and idiomatic keyboard-orchestral support—skills that soon flower in his better-documented stage and concert arias.2