Mozart's Compositional Method - Sketches

Sketches

Mozart often wrote down sketches, ranging in size from small snippets to extensive drafts, for his compositions. Although many of these have not survived, having been destroyed by Mozart's widow Constanze, about 320 sketches and drafts are extant, covering about 10 percent of the composer's work.

Ulrich Konrad, an expert on the sketches, describes a well-worked-out system of sketching that Mozart used, based on examination of the surviving documents. Typically the most "primitive" sketches are in casual handwriting, and give just snippets of music. More advanced sketches cover the most salient musical lines (the melody line, and often the bass), leaving other lines to be filled in later. The so-called "draft score" was one in an advanced enough state for Mozart to consider it complete, and therefore enter it (after 1784) into the personal catalog that he called Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke ("Catalog of all my works"). However, the draft score did not include all of the notes: it remained to flesh out the internal voices, filling out the harmony. These were added to create the completed score, which appeared in a highly legible hand.

This procedure makes sense of another letter Mozart wrote to Leopold, discussing his work in Munich on the opera Idomeneo (30 December 1780), where Mozart makes a distinction between "composed" and "written":

I must finish now, because I've got to write at breakneck speed—everything's composed—but not written yet.

In Konrad's view, Mozart had completed the "draft score" of the work, but still needed to produce the completed, final version.

Of the sketches that survive, none are for solo keyboard works. Konrad suggests that "improvisation or the actual trying out of particularly challenging imaginative possibilities could compensate in these cases for the lack of sketches."