Mozart’s Lost Fantasy

In 2024, after immersing myself in Mozart’s completed works for piano, I turned to the hundred or so incomplete sketches he left behind. One fourteen-bar fragment in F minor (K. Anh. 32) stopped me cold: it erupts in an agitated Baroque-inspired improvisation, only to dissolve into a dreamscape of repeating notes, sour harmonies, and wistful filigree that feels decades ahead of its time, foreshadowing the Romantic piano writing of Chopin.

And then the music simply... stops.

Composed in 1789, crushed by debt, beset by illness, and facing his own mortality, Mozart’s sketch fizzles out mid-stream—its last bars swallowed by the chaos of life. No edition offers a performable realization, yet those halted measures continued to haunt me.

Rather than attempt a full completion, I became a jeweler for this musical gemstone, interweaving it with two vocal laments by Mozart. There’s Barbarina’s anguished “I’ve lost it” from The Marriage of Figaro, alongside music from Das Lied der Trennung with the lyrics, “Forgetting robs in hours what love took years to give.”

Only five percent of the Fantasy’s completion is by me; the rest is pure, passionate, transcendent Mozart. With a hint of fairy dust to bind the music, I’ve fashioned a self-portrait of Mozart at the close of his life—Mozart in conversation with himself, contemplating the universal fear that time will erase what we hold dear.

Find a performance of my completion below, more info and the score here, and my new EP “Lost & Found” on Spotify and Apple Music.