Fugue for Piano in F (fragment), K. Anh.H 12,26
av Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The Fugue for Piano in F (fragment), K. Anh.H 12,26, survives only as a short contrapuntal sketch associated with Mozart’s Viennese years. Although often dated to 1782 in secondary listings, the Mozarteum’s Köchel database places the extant fragment in Vienna c. 1788–1790, with keyboard (clav) as its indicated scoring [1].
What Is Known
Only a fragment of a fugue in F major is transmitted, catalogued as K. Anh.H 12,26 (also known in earlier Köchel numbering as K. 383b) [1]. The work is extant and identified for keyboard (clav) in the Mozarteum’s catalogue entry [1]. Its dating is not secure: while some modern databases associate it with Vienna in 1782 (when Mozart, aged 26, was intensely occupied with learned counterpoint), the Mozarteum’s current Köchel dating instead places the surviving leaf in Vienna around 1788–1790 [1]. As with several small fugal sketches circulating under Mozart’s name, its precise purpose—exercise, compositional draft, or material intended for another context—cannot be established from the fragment alone.
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Musical Content
The surviving page preserves the opening of a fugue: a single subject laid out in F major and answered in imitative entries, suggesting Mozart testing the subject’s contrapuntal possibilities rather than drafting a finished performance piece. In that sense it belongs to the same broad Viennese preoccupation that produced both completed keyboard counterpoint (for example the Prelude and Fugue in C, K. 394) and a cluster of unfinished fugal fragments known from the period [2]. Even in embryo, the writing points toward Mozart’s late-1780s habit of treating strict forms with a pianist’s clarity—lean textures, clean entries, and a focus on thematic profile—while leaving open whether he ever intended to expand the sketch into a full fugue.
[1] Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (Köchel-Verzeichnis), work entry for K. Anh.H 12,26: status, dating (Vienna c. 1788–1790), key, and instrumentation (clav).
[2] IMSLP catalogue page for the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, listing the keyboard counterpoint/fragment section that includes “Fragment einer Fuge in F … (383b)”.