Giorgia Fabro

W. A. Mozart
Sonata in A minor KV 310

Mozart was in Paris when he wrote this piece in the summer of 1778 (he moved to France in
September 1777 and he stayed there until January 1779). Unfortunately his stay in Paris was very
sad and tragic, not ony because he found an environment not very welcoming, not very grateful,
almost indifferent to his figure as a composer (to this were added the frustrating exhortations of
his father who tried to convince him to return to Salzburg to accept a new engagement with the
archbishop of the city), but also because he had to face the pain of losing his beloved mother who
came with him to the French capital to accompany him (she died after suffering for two months,
probably because of the unhealthy sanitary conditions of the French capital at that time).
Given the circumstances of drafting it is probable that the high quality, the great strength, the vital
energy, the passionate poetry, the drama contained in this piece should be explainable precisely in
relation to what happened in Paris in that period. However, there is no trace of a declared
correlation between the composed piece and the frame of his personal events.
The piece was already published in Paris, by the publisher Heina, the first case of a Mozart piano
Sonata to find the way of publication immediately after birth.
On the first leg of the journey to Paris - Augusta, the city where the father's family came from -
Mozart had been able to play the pianos of Johann Andreas Stein, appreciating all the qualities
that made these prototypes among the most advanced in Europe. The three Sonatas written in the
following months (K. 309, 310 and 311) therefore see the author now aware of the potential of the
hammered instrument, and projected to define a keyboard writing designed to exploit this
potential. The Sonata in A minor is perhaps the most obvious example of this new attitude. It is not
by chance that it is the first and - with the Sonata in C minor K. 457 - one of the only two piano
Sonatas written by Mozart in a minor key, a choice that is reflected in a highly dramatic musical
content.
The first movement is marked by harmonic dissonances and the rhythm of the incipit on the right
hand and it is written in a large sonata form. In the exposition the two themes are counterposed
(the march of the first against the sliding semicromes of the second). The development is
animated by the insistent figures of the left hand and the evocative polyphonic progressions of the
right, and the recapitulation converts the second theme in the minor key, bringing it back to the
prevailing expressive setting of the movement.