"Kleiner Trauermarsch" ("Little Funeral March") in

C minor C minor is a minor scale based on C, consisting of the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. Its key signature consists of three flats. Its relative major is E major and its parallel major is C major. The C natural minor scale is: Cha ...

, K. 453a, is a keyboard work composed in 1784 by

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition and proficiency from an early age ...

, written in the notebook of his student

Barbara Ployer Maria Anna Barbara or Babette Ployer (2 September 1765 – before April 1811) was an Austrian piano and composition pupil of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for whom he wrote two piano concertos in 1784, No. 14 KV. 449 and No. 17, KV. 453, which were b ...

. The piece is subtitled (Funeral March for Mr. Master Counterpoint); Mozart's grotesque exaggeration of conventional features of

funeral march A funeral march (' in French, ' in Italian, ' in German, ' in Polish), as a musical genre, is a march (music), march, usually in a minor key, in a slow Meter (music), "simple duple" metre, imitating the solemn pace of a funeral procession. Some suc ...

es mark it as a humorous parody. It consists of two sections of eight bars each, both repeated, and has no

counterpoint In music theory, counterpoint is the relationship of two or more simultaneous musical lines (also called voices) that are harmonically dependent on each other, yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. The term originates from the Latin ...

. A performance takes about two minutes."Performance"
by on a Hammerklavier It was first published in 1930. The autograph has been lost in 1945.

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* * Piano music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1784 compositions Humor in classical music Musical parodies {{classical-composition-stub