Piano Sonata No. 13 (Mozart)

The Piano Sonata in B-flat major, K. 333 (315c), was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Linz at the end of 1783.

Dating

There is no doubt that this sonata was first published on April 21, 1784 in Vienna by Christoph Torricella (along with K. 284 and K. 454, as op. 7). The actual date of composition, however, has proved more difficult to determine. Because the manuscript is not written on the type of music paper Mozart is known to have used in Vienna, scholars believed that the piece was composed before Mozart moved to that city. Thus Köchel, in the first edition of his Mozart catalog (1862), gave the hypothetical date 1779, later clarified by Georges de Saint-Foix (1936) to "Salzburg, beginning of January–March 1779." However, Alfred Einstein, in the third edition of the Köchel catalog (1937), said that it was composed in "late summer 1778 in Paris." This date was maintained even until the sixth edition of the Köchel catalog (1964).

More recently, this date has been invalidated by the findings of Wolfgang Plath and Alan Tyson. On the basis of Mozart's script, Plath assigns the piece to the time around 1783/84, "likely not long before the appearance of the first print." Furthermore, Tyson convincingly demonstrates through paper tests that the work was composed at the end of 1783, likely in November, around the same time as the "Linz Symphony", K. 425, when the Mozart couple made a stopover in Linz on their way back to Vienna from Salzburg. This new dating also fits stylistic criteria.