Wolfgang Amadé Mozart
Concerto Movement in E major for Horn and Orchestra
K. 494a
completed by Uri Rom
The Music Department of the Berlin State Library holds a fragment of a horn concerto in E major by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. Its provenance cannot be established with certainty. Based on analyses of the paper and handwriting, musicologists agree that the fragment must date from around 1785/86.
For whom the large-scale Concerto in E major, K. 494a, was intended remains unclear. It does not appear to have been Joseph Leutgeb, for whom Mozart wrote the three horn concertos, the Rondo K. 371, the Concerto K. 412 and the Horn Quintet K. 407; this movement was apparently unknown to him. According to Constanze Mozart (in a letter to the publisher Johann Anton André), the widow of the horn player Jacob Eisen owned "some original scores for the horn."
The surviving autograph fragment ends at bar 91, at the end of folio 4. It may therefore be assumed that Mozart did not stop here but continued composing, and that the following sections are now lost.
Review in the journal "Das Orchester" (in German)
From Acta Mozartiana, Issues 1+2, 2006 (translated from the German)
Regardless of the impression that this movement might be too long for a Mozart horn concerto, ... Rom succeeds in finding a solution that comes very close to Mozart's idiom, is carefully considered in every respect and is artistically convincing. At the very least, the composition, which received its premiere on 26 November 2006 in the Kammermusiksaal of the Berlin Philharmonie, clearly sounds like Mozart ... That is certainly the best one can say about such completions.
– Ulrich Konrad
- Work: Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, first movement of a horn concerto in E major, K. 494a; completion of the fragment by Uri Rom
- Scoring: solo horn in E, 2 oboes, 2 horns, strings
- Duration: approx. 10 minutes
- Premiere: 26 November 2006, Kammermusiksaal of the Berlin Philharmonie; Sebastian Posch (horn), Kammerakademie Berlin, conducted by Uri Rom
About the Completion's Author
Uri Rom was born in Tel Aviv in 1969. He studied orchestral conducting in Berlin with Prof. C. A. Bünte and Prof. Rolf Reuter, as well as harpsichord and early music at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and music theory with Prof. Dr. Hartmut Fladt at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). He currently teaches orchestral conducting at the UdK Berlin and conducts several orchestras in Berlin. As a scholarship holder of the Berlin Senate, he is pursuing a doctorate under Prof. Dr. Christian Martin Schmidt at the Technical University of Berlin on various aspects of the use of keys in Mozart's works. He also composes, mainly in historical styles. His Rondo for natural horn and orchestra was published by Edition Dohr, Cologne, in 2005.
