Adagio in B minor for Piano (Fragment), K. 708
von Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s Adagio in B minor for solo piano (K. 708) is a brief, unfinished fragment dating from early 1788, and it is widely understood as an initial draft for the later Adagio in B minor, K. 540. Preserved only in a 19th-century copy, it offers a rare glimpse of Mozart’s thought as he shaped one of his most concentrated keyboard utterances.
What Is Known
The Adagio in B minor, K. 708, survives as an incomplete keyboard fragment, transmitted not in Mozart’s autograph but in a 19th-century copy made by the Viennese collector Aloys Fuchs. The Mozarteum catalogue dates the work to Vienna, January–February 1788, and notes that the combination of key and tempo marking makes it very likely an early draft for the finished Adagio in B minor, K. 540, which Mozart entered in his own thematic catalogue on 19 March 1788.[1] The fragment is edited in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe among the individual piano pieces.[2]
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Musical Content
Since the surviving source is a single-page copy and the music breaks off, K. 708 is best heard as a compositional “starting-point” rather than a performable, self-contained movement. What can be said with confidence is that Mozart had already fixed the work’s essential expressive frame—Adagio tempo and the unusually dark B minor tonality—before arriving at the fully worked, rhetorically expansive design of K. 540.[1]
[1] Mozarteum (Köchel Verzeichnis) entry for K. 708: source transmission (Aloys Fuchs copy), dating (Vienna, Jan–Feb 1788), and relationship to K. 540.
[2] Digital Mozart Edition (Neue Mozart-Ausgabe) table of contents for NMA IX/27/2 showing K. 708 as an *Adagio in b (fragment)* among the piano pieces.