A sonata finale in imitation of a Turkish military band — bright, fast, and harder than it sounds.
The A major sonata K. 331 is unusual from its first bar — it opens with a set of variations rather than a sonata-form movement — and it ends with this rondo, which Mozart headed Alla turca: Allegretto. Vienna in the 1780s was fascinated by Turkish music: the janissary bands of the Ottoman army, with their cymbals, bass drums and triangles, had become a fashionable exotic sound, and composers imitated them with drumming bass octaves and clattering grace notes. Mozart had used the same device in Die Entführung aus dem Serail two years earlier.
The movement alternates a scurrying A minor idea with a loud A major refrain over hammered broken octaves in the left hand — the drum — and ends with a long, bright coda on the same material. It takes about three and a half minutes, and it is the reason a great many people know K. 331 without knowing they do.
The notes are not individually difficult; the tempo is. Almost everything in the A minor sections is a run of even sixteenths in the right hand over a light left-hand accompaniment, and it has to stay light — Mozart’s texture is thin, and any heaviness shows at once. The A major refrain asks the left hand to keep broken octaves going quickly and quietly, which is a stamina problem more than a reading one, and the grace-note figures above them have to sound like decoration rather than extra beats.
This is the clearest case for a speed control there is. Set the tempo well below where the piece should sit, get the fingering and the articulation right, then move up in small steps. The piece is honest about whether you are ready, because at speed it either stays even or it does not.
No levelled arrangement for this one yet — you play the score as it stands, with the app's tempo control, wait mode and one-hand practice to get you there. Levelled arrangements are added a curated batch at a time. See the Library
