Lost Fantasy in F minor

Details

Lost Fantasy in F minor for solo piano by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart & Greg Anderson, based on Mozart’s unfinished fantasy fragment in F minor, K. Anh. 32 (K⁶ 383C), “L’ho perduta, me meschina!” (”I’ve lost it, poor me!”) from Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), K. 492, and “Das Lied der Trennung” (“Song of Parting”), K. 519 / Full score + the original fantasy fragment and a simplified arrangement of “L’ho perduta” / Difficulty: Intermediate-advanced / Duration: 6 minutes / Pages: 10 / Copyright: 2024 / Work number: 113 / Featured on Lost & Found / Spotify / Apple Music

Program notes

“Forgetting robs in hours what love took years to give.”
—Das Lied der Trennung (Song of Parting) by W.A. Mozart, set to lyrics by K.E.K. Schmidt

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, ca. 1789) 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 amid chronic debt, illness, and the shadow of mortality, this fragment bears the weight of Mozart’s final years and hints at creative urgency paused mid-thought. Did life’s anxieties draw his spirit away? Or did the manuscript paper slip beneath unpaid bills?

Rather than attempt a full completion, I became a jeweler for this musical gemstone—interweaving it with two vocal laments by Mozart, each born of that same late-1780s introspection, each in F minor.

The new “Lost Fantasy in F minor” opens with the fragment’s introduction, styled as an operatic recitative that leads directly to Barbarina’s “L’ho perduta” (”I have lost it”) from The Marriage of Figaro (1786). After her panicked confession of loss, the fragment returns—not with its opening flourish but with the dreamscape of its second half, now revealed as the Fantasy’s enigmatic core. At last, Barbarina’s cavatina reappears in heightened fervor, propelling the music toward its breathless climax.

In the Fantasy’s final moments, a ghost of “Das Lied der Trennung,” K. 519 (1787) drifts through: “Vergisst sie mich?” (“Will she forget me?”), reframed here as Mozart’s own plea: “Will I be forgotten?” The haunting melody lingers on sighing figures, with the last syllable of vergisst (”forget”) trailing off like a fading breath, as if memory itself were vanishing into silence.

Only five percent of this Fantasy is mine; 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. As the final chord fades, we are left with nothing but an echo—and by remembering, we keep it alive.

—Greg Anderson

Find additional program notes on the Fantasy fragment in F minor, K. Anh. 32 here.