SOME PRELIMINARIES

Determining likely influences on Mozart's piano sonatas is no easy task. Any study that attempted a comprehensive survey of such influences would inevitably be frustrated by all or some of the following problems:

1. (1) Given the wide range of musical styles and genres to which Mozart's acutely receptive mind had been exposed during his formative years, it is unlikely that his sonatas were influenced solely by other sonatas, his trios only by trios, his quartets only by other quartets, and so on. Rather, features of all these various types, and others, were absorbed and reformulated over time. The field of enquiry is potentially endless. Nevertheless, we have to start somewhere, and restricting the repertoire to be studied purely to the piano sonatas of Mozart's contemporaries will at least prove manageable.

2. (2) During the 1760s and 1770s the ‘keyboard’ sonata was most often ‘avec accompagnement de violon ad libitum’, so that, in assessing the sonatas of composers such as Schobert, Honauer, Raupach, Eckard and Hüllmandel (composers whose music Mozart came to know in Paris) it is mainly to their accompanied piano sonatas that we have to turn.

3. […]