Mozart and the Sonata Form

The only major genre in which Mozart presumably wrote more than he did in that of the piano-cum-violin sonata was the symphony, of which there are more than fifty examples, if one counts the paste-up jobs (opera overtures with added finales) and the outright phonies (e.g. Nos. 3 and 37). The usual (B & H?) listing of the sonatas runs to 37 (the last of these a piano sonata with somebody else's fiddle part). William S. Newman (The Sonata in the Classic era) lists 44.  (Mozart wrote more concerti than he did violin sonatas, true; but I disting­uish between piano concerti and bas­soon concerti just as I distinguish between violin sonatas and organ sonatas.)

Not only did Mozart write a lot of violin sonatas; he began writing them very early--at the ripe old age of six, to be exact, as a follow-up to the five keyboard pieces with which he had announced his compositional prowess to the world. By early 1764 he had whipped up a set of four (K. 6-9); apparently pausing only to get his wind, he turned out another set in the fall, this one running to six (K. 10-15). Convalescing from an illness in The Hague two years later, he wrote a second set of six (K. 26-31). In 1768 in Vienna, he turned out a pair of anomalies: duets for violin and 'cello or piano! Then follows a mysterious set of surprisingly mature and passionate sonatas (K. 55-61), supposedly written in Milan in the early '70s. These have been the focus of violent scholarly disagreement, one faction claiming them for one Joseph Schuster or some anonymous pupil of Mozart's, the other insisting that they are genuine, and obviously reflect some Sturm und Drang in the composer's personal life.   

I bring all this up because the "complete" recordings of the Mozart violin sonatas, including this one, have ignored these works entirely. There is a flute-and-harpsichord version, of which Mozart would have approved, of K. 10-15, but I know of no other recordings. None of these juvenilia are great or indispensable and the violin parts are conceived of as merely decorative accompaniments for the piano, so that they are unlikely to appeal to your typical virtuoso, but it would be nice if some performers, dedicated to the art of music, would perform them to give us the complete picture.

This is to take nothing away from the efforts of the Messrs. Shumsky and Balsam, whose recording of the mature sonatas is the first to appear here in well over a decade, as far as I can make out. In their first two volumes they celebrated Mozart's return to the form as an adult in his early twenties, after having neglected it for ten years (if one overlooks the mysterious K. 55-61). Volumes 3 and 4 pick up with the four sonatas written in Vienna in 1781, the momentous year in which Mozart shook the dust of Salzburg (or the salts of Dustburg) from his shoes forever and later inaugurated his friendship with Haydn. From the same year come the two innocuous but charming sets of variations on French airs; the second, though known by the title indicated on the record, is really on the tune of "Au bord d'une fontaine".  Also included are two unfinished sonatas of 1782, K. 402-3. The first of these, an andante and fugue, was completed by Mozart's friend, the Abbe Maximilian Stadler, not to be confused with his friend, clarinetist Anton Stadler.