Rondo alla Turca

Mozart wrote the Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331, in 1783, and Artaria published it in Vienna in 1784 together with the sonatas K. 330 and K. 332. Its last movement is marked Alla turca, Allegretto, in the Turkish style, and it has been famous on its own for so long that plenty of people who know the tune have never heard the rest of the sonata.

The Turkish style was a Viennese fashion. Ottoman military bands, the Janissary bands, were known in Europe, and composers imitated their big drums, cymbals and triangles in music that was meant to sound exotic and a little comic. Mozart used it again in his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. In this movement the left hand does the drumming: in the A major refrain it strikes a rolled chord twice on every beat under a march played in octaves.

In 2014 the librarian Balázs Mikusi found four pages of Mozart's own manuscript of the sonata in the National Széchényi Library in Budapest, and the pianist Zoltán Kocsis played the rediscovered score there that September.

This page carries the opening of the rondo: the eight bar theme in A minor, the answer that goes to C major and back, and the A major refrain, each with its repeat. On a mandolin, an octave below the piano, all of it sits in first position between the first fret of the G course and the fourth fret of the A course. The theme's opening turn, B, A, G sharp, A, then C, is the figure the whole piece is built from, and it wants a clean down, up. The refrain is where the accidentals come thick. Learn it slowly at the first speed, because the real tempo is about twice the fastest chip.