Mozart's Rondo alla Turca is marked "alla turca" — in the Turkish style — and what it imitates is the Janissary military band music that was in fashion in Vienna in the eighteenth century: bass drum, cymbals, jingles, all of it made on a piano. It is the finale of the Piano Sonata No. 11, K. 331, and that sonata has one very unusual feature: three movements, and not one of them in sonata form. 2:43, with the full piano score on screen, note by note.
Turkish things were in fashion in Vienna then
Mozart wrote the sonata in 1783; the Viennese publisher Artaria printed it the following year alongside Sonatas No. 10 and No. 12.
He marked this last movement "alla turca" — in the Turkish style. What he was imitating is Janissary band music: the military music of the Ottoman empire, scored largely for bass drum, cymbals and jingles. That sound was very much in vogue in Vienna at the time — so much so that some pianos were fitted with an extra pedal that struck bells and a drum, meant for exactly this kind of piece.
The sonata is unusual in another way. The first movement is a theme and variations, the second a minuet, the third a rondo — not one of the three is in sonata form. Convention said a sonata opened with an allegro in sonata form. He did not do that.
The manuscript has a story too. For a long time only its final page was known to survive. In 2014 the librarian Balázs Mikusi identified four pages of Mozart's autograph in the collection of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest — this very piece. That September the pianist Zoltán Kocsis played from the rediscovered score.
It is what plays on the radio in The Truman Show
In The Truman Show (1998) this is what plays on the car radio as Truman drives to work. The film is about a man living inside a reality show built around him without knowing it, and the tune's brightness in that scene is exactly the point.
A procession comes past, goes away, and comes back
The opening is in the minor: quiet, curling up and sliding down, like someone walking on tiptoe. It is not loud — if anything it sounds furtive.
Then the drums arrive. That is the major-key section, where the left hand slams chords in groups and the right hand hammers a repeated figure on top. That is the "military band": there is no drum, but you hear one.
The two alternate: the tiptoe music, the procession going past, something else, the procession again, the tiptoe music back, the procession one last time. The same material returns several times, and it gets louder as it goes.
The coda is the loudest thing in the piece, running straight to the end and landing on a few slammed chords. Two minutes forty-three, and it never once winds down quietly.
An irregular rondo: A–B–C–B–A–B, then a coda
It is an irregular rondo: A–B–C–B–A–B, then a coda. A is the tiptoe phrase in A minor, B is the Janissary band in A major, C brings in different material again. B returns three times — more than anything else — and B is the part everyone remembers.
The percussion imitation in B is plain on the page: the left hand hammers three-note chords downward in a continuous stream while the right repeats one figure high up. Mozart wrote no instruction saying "like a drum"; the effect is built entirely out of the figuration.
The score has four repeat groups and four first/second endings, and this version plays all of them, which comes to 170 bars in 2/4.
One thousand four hundred and twenty-five notes are written down (plus one hundred and eighty-nine grace notes); with every repeat played they come to one thousand eight hundred and six (and two hundred and twenty-eight grace notes).
In section B it is the arm that tires, not the fingers
Section A is regular enough; the difficulty is cleanliness. The right-hand sixteenths need to stay separate, and too much pedal turns them into a smear.
Section B is stamina. The left hand hammers chords continuously, four groups to a bar, and by the end the arm knows about it. The weight has to come from the arm rather than being held up by the fingers, or the strokes get heavier and heavier.
Do not set off at full speed. This version takes 120 to the quarter and runs two minutes forty-three; much faster and section A loses the tiptoe quality.
Playing every repeat is this version's choice — if you are learning it, get the piece fluent without the repeats first.
We rate this 4 out of 5.
The first two movements of the same sonata
The first movement is a theme and variations on a siciliana rhythm, quiet and orderly, and sounds nothing like this one. The second is a minuet and trio.
For the same composer at an easier level: the first movement of the Piano Sonata in C major, K. 545.
For the same device of one idea returning ever more thickly: the second movement of Beethoven's Pathétique — same method, opposite mood.
