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After playing Mozart's Rondo alla Turca/Turkish March (3rd movement of K. 331) with "John Thompson's Modern Course for the Piano - 5th Grade" for some time, I recently bought Henle's "Mozart, Klaviersonaten - Band II" that contains the same piece. I was amazed to find a discrepancy in the notes in bar 55 (In the fourth sixteenth note, F# in Thompson, A in Henle):



On the one hand, I think that the Thompson's F# sounds better, but on the other hand Henle's edition is an Urtext and not likely to contain errors. What should I do?

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Is there anything about this in the commentaries in Henle? – nonpop Jun 25 '13 at 9:28
up vote 3 down vote accepted

There are a couple things you can do:

  1. If possible, somehow get a look at Mozart's original manuscript (if it's even still around.) Deferring to the original composer is always the best method of figuring out what's correct. Since finding the original manuscript will probably be unlikely, there are a couple of other recommendations:
  2. Look at several editions - as many as you can find. Whatever pops up the most often is usually a good indicator of what is generally accepted to be correct.
  3. Listen to some professional recordings of the piece - for the same reasons above.

Lastly, when it comes to questions of correctness and I can't make up my mind after doing the things above, I defer to the Breitkopf editions. They are considered to be a solid collection of materials.

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Breitkopf and every other edition I can find has F#. The A is either a mistake or the editor took a few liberties with the piece. – American Luke Jun 24 '13 at 18:03
We are in agreement :) – jjmusicnotes Jun 24 '13 at 19:23

The first edition has A, not F#: see According to the new Mozart Edition ( this was introduced in an early Breitkopf print, it was given as the only reading in the collected edition of 1878, and is in the NME as an ossia. In the absence of other evidence (the autograph manuscript apparently is missing all but measures 90-127) A is correct.

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