Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 2 in F major, K 280 / 189e, (

1774 Events January–March * January 21 – Mustafa III, List of Ottoman Sultans, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, dies and is succeeded by his brother Abdul Hamid I. * January 27 ** An angry crowd in Boston, Massachusetts seizes, tars, and f ...

) is a piano sonata in three movements. The work was written down along with other piano sonatas during the visit Mozart paid to Munich for the production of ''

La finta giardiniera ' ("The Pretend Garden-Girl"), K. 196, is an Italian-language opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart wrote it in Munich in January 1775 when he was 18 years old and it received its first performance on 13 January at the in Munich. There is deb ...

'' from late 1774 to the beginning of the following March. A typical performance of the sonata takes about 14 minutes.

Allegro assai

The first movement of the

sonata Sonata (; Italian: , pl. ''sonate''; from Latin and Italian: ''sonare'' rchaic Italian; replaced in the modern language by ''suonare'' "to sound"), in music, literally means a piece ''played'' as opposed to a cantata (Latin and Italian ''cant ...

is in sonata form, and consists of three themes of new material, a development, in which the themes from the exposition are varied and combined, and a recapitulation, in which the exposition is

repeated A rerun or repeat is a rebroadcast of an episode of a radio or television program. There are two types of reruns – those that occur during a hiatus, and those that occur when a program is syndicated. Variations In the United Kingdom, the wo ...

and varied. The sonata begins with the first theme of the exposition, which itself begins with a forte arpeggiated chord, followed by three thirds. The theme next contains a series of falling quarter notes over block chords and Alberti bass, rapid sixteenth notes, and falling fifths. The second theme consists of legato triplets in the right hand over octaves in the left. The theme is somewhat

chromatic Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are most often used to characterize scales, and are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a pair, ...

, with frequent

accidentals In music, an accidental is a note of a pitch (or pitch class) that is not a member of the scale or mode indicated by the most recently applied key signature. In musical notation, the sharp (), flat (), and natural () symbols, among others, ma ...

. The third theme is mostly quarter and eighth notes with an irregular accompaniment. The exposition ends with a

C major C major (or the key of C) is a major scale based on C, consisting of the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. C major is one of the most common keys used in music. Its key signature has no flats or sharps. Its relative minor is A minor and ...

chord. The development and recapitulation follow, varying and combining these themes before restating them, as is normal in sonata form.

Adagio

The second movement of the sonata is an adagio in F minor. It is the only piano sonata by Mozart with a slow movement in a minor key. While not marked as such, the movement is a siciliana, which Mozart would later revisit in the slow movement of his A major piano concerto (K.488). The mood of this movement is mournful and tragic, with the opening somewhat resembling a funeral march. Estonian composer

Arvo Pärt Arvo Pärt (; born 11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabuli, a compositional technique he invented. Pärt's music is in pa ...

's 1992 (rev. 2005) piece ''Mozart's Adagio'' reimagined the music from this movement in a work for violin, cello and piano.

Presto

The sonata ends with a presto (sonata form) in F major. It is relatively short for a presto, taking between two and three minutes to play.

References

Sources

* *

External links

* * * (

Alte Mozart-Ausgabe The ''Alte Mozart-Ausgabe'' is the name by which the first complete edition of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is known nowadays, published by Breitkopf & Härtel from January 1877 to December 1883, with supplements published until 1910. Th ...

version)
Recording
played by Harvard Fellow Seda Röder Piano Sonata 02 Compositions in F major 1774 compositions {{sonata-stub