Fugue for Four Singers in A major (K. Anh.H 12,29)
di Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The so-called Fugue for four Singers in A major (K. Anh.H 12,29) is a short contrapuntal fragment associated with Mozart’s Vienna years, dated in catalogues to 1782. Though its authorship is uncertain, it offers a glimpse of the kind of fugal “voice-leading exercise” that surrounded Mozart’s work at the keyboard in his mid-twenties.
Background and Context
In 1782, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was newly established in Vienna at the age of 26—fresh from the triumph of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (first performed in July 1782) and in the months of his marriage to Constanze Weber (August 1782) [2]. In this same period, catalogues group a number of brief contrapuntal sketches and fugue fragments around Mozart’s keyboard activity, including a piece listed as a fugue in A “for four voices” (sometimes described as “for four singers”) [1]. In the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (NMA), the work appears among the fragments as a notated fugue in open score, underscoring its sketch-like, study character rather than a polished concert piece [3].
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Musical Character
Although often classified under keyboard music, the designation “four singers” is best understood as “four independent voices” in the fugal texture—lines that can be read as soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, laid out in open score rather than the two-staff idiom of finished piano writing [1] [3]. The music presents a compact, academically inclined working-out of imitation in A major, with the voices entering in turn and weaving a tightly controlled contrapuntal fabric. Read at the keyboard, it resembles the kind of “written-out counterpoint” Mozart also pursued in more fully realized fugal essays of the early 1780s—music meant as much for compositional discipline as for sound [1].
[1] Mozarteum (KV Digital): entry for K. Anh. H 12,29 (Fr *1782k), describing the Fugue in A (for four voices) and noting alternate descriptions.
[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica: Mozart biography (Vienna in 1782; Die Entführung aus dem Serail; marriage to Constanze Weber).
[3] Digital Mozart Edition (DME), Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (NMA) table of contents: NMA X/30/4 listing Anh. H 12/29 (385n; 1782k) as a fugue in open score among fragments.