Canon for Two Voices, “Beym Arsch ist’s finster” (K. Anh.C 9.03)
di Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The short two-voice canon “Beym Arsch ist’s finster” (K. Anh.C 9.03) is a scatological Viennese round transmitted under Mozart’s name and usually dated to 1783, when he was 27. Its text also circulated in a censored substitute (“Die Nacht ist finster”), and modern catalogues treat the attribution as incorrect.
Background and Context
K. Anh.C 9.03 survives as a brief canon with the opening words “Beym Arsch ist’s finster” (“It’s dark by the arse”), commonly placed in Vienna around 1783, in the same private, convivial milieu that produced other humorous canons and part-songs sung among friends after dinner and at Geselligkeit (informal social gatherings) [1]. The work’s transmission history includes early nineteenth-century copies and prints under the sanitized title “Die Nacht ist finster,” reflecting a long tradition of substituting “decent” words for performance and publication [1]. In the late 1790s, the song is already mentioned in correspondence connected with Mozart’s estate and publishers, suggesting that (whatever its true authorship) it circulated as a “Mozart” item quite soon after his death [2].
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Musical Character
On the page, the piece is designed as a canon (round): a compact, singable line meant to be imitated by the second voice at a short time-distance, creating quick, close-knit counterpoint without any elaborate development [1]. Although the canon is frequently encountered today in arrangements that add a bass line and present it as a small trio, the core catalogue entry describes it as a canon (and the historical sources often circulate it with alternative, “cleaned” text), so its effect is less about grand choral sonority than about the comic friction between polite musical craft and deliberately coarse words [1].
[1] Mozarteum (Köchel Verzeichnis) work entry for KV Anh. C 9.03: status/authenticity, transmission, sources, early prints.
[2] Digital Mozart Edition (Mozarteum), English transcription PDF: Nissen correspondence (1799) mentioning “Beym Arsch ists finster” and its catalogue reference.