Mozart's Piano Sonata, K 545

In 1788, around the time he was writing his 39th Symphony, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the first two movements of his 15th Piano Sonata, and all of his 16th Piano Sonata. He completed the C major Sonata on June 28, 1788, and indicated in his thematic catalog that it was a piece for beginners.

I first encountered the piece when I was ten or eleven, playing violin in an orchestra (the "All City" orchestra) in Newton, Massachusetts. One of the pieces on the program that we played at the Newton Free Library was the middle movement of K545 in a hand-written arrangement for piano and string orchestra. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

Sometime earlier in 2021 I was asked to arrange the first movement of this piece for string trio to play for a wedding, and was then informed that the people getting married had changed their mind (not about getting married, but about having this piece played). By that time I had put in some significant work on the transcription, and had fallen in love (once again) with the piece, so I decided to expand my arrangement and make it for string orchestra or string quintet, and include all the movements. I was amazed at how beautifully it transcribed (it kind of transcribed itself--I just put the notes in the places they needed to go). The International Music Company will be publishing it sometime in the next year.

I have been spending a lot of time at the piano lately, and have been making my way through the Mozart Sonatas trying to think a little bit like a pianist rather than like a tourist-composer.

I was not surprised to witness the growing pianistic complexity in the progression from one sonata to the next, but I was surprised that when I started practicing K545, I was able to think in a very clear way about what my hands and fingers were doing (or should be doing). It was almost as if Mozart were giving me a lesson in piano playing. I don't know if his purpose was to use the smallest number of notes possible to get the maximum amount of musical substance, but he certainly succeeded. Indeed, aside from a handful of triads and a few repeated eighth-note thirds, the piece spends much of its time as a duet for two voices.

And its brevity is remarkable.

Could Mozart have written it as an exercise in a kind of minimalism--a "chaser" after the Sturm und Drang of the C minor Sonata, K457? Could his attempt at simplicity in the 15th Sonata (in F major) written six months earlier in January of 1788, not have been pianistically or formally pared-down enough to serve his purpose?