Mozart Piano Fantasia in C Minor K475: For Cello and Simple Accompaniment

Here is the sheet music of a transcription for cello and simple accompaniment of Mozart‘s Piano Fantasia in C Minor K475. This cello transcription keeps the original key of C Minor. This is only a first draft and requires quite a lot more work to arrive at the stage of a finished product.

The pitch range of this Fantasia is extreme, using the entire range of the keyboard of his time, from a low F (a fifth below the cello’s open C-string) up to a high F, five octaves above this lowest note. This causes us some problems in the transcription process.

Playing music of the Classical Period on the cello, we normally use a range of less than four octaves, seldom going higher than our E (a fifth above the mid-string harmonic). Because the original range of this Fantasia takes us more than one octave higher than this, the cellofun adaptation uses many octave transpositions in order to keep the cello part within the standard, “classical” (and most comfortable) fingerboard regions. Because of these frequent octave transpositions, perhaps this should be called an “arrangement” rather than a “transcription” ?

This Fantasia lasts anything from 12 to 15 minutes, making it as long as many of his Piano Sonatas.