Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) · sheet music
- Time 2/4
- Levels 6–8
- Passages 6
Your turn · both hands
Preparing your passage…
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian classical (1756–1791). The reading release has 6 passages from this piece at levels 6–8; the reader above opens on the easiest, bars 21–24 for the right hand alone.
The hardest stretch is bars 9–24 at level 8.
Your practice path
Learn it the way teachers do: each hand on its own, then together, then the hard bars. Each step is a real graded passage of Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March).
- Right hand alone · bars 21–24 level 6
- Hands together · bars 9–16 level 7
- The hardest bars · bars 9–24 level 8
How to play Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March)
- Mozart marked it Allegretto, not presto; pick a tempo you can hold through the fastest sixteenth-note passages.
- Keep the left hand's bass-and-chord accompaniment crisp and detached, like a marching band's drums.
- In the A-major march, roll the right-hand chords quickly and crisply so the rhythm stays square, and play the left-hand broken octaves from a loose wrist.
- Practice the F-sharp-minor episode in dotted rhythms, long-short then short-long, to even out the sixteenths before playing them straight.
Structure
The movement follows a rondo-like plan. The A-minor opening theme alternates with a loud march-like refrain in A major, and between them comes an F-sharp-minor episode of running sixteenths. After the theme and march return, a coda in A major, with rolled chords over a drum-like left hand, closes the sonata. It takes about three and a half minutes.
About Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March)
This is the finale of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331, published in Vienna in 1784 with two other sonatas. Viennese audiences were fascinated by Ottoman Janissary bands, with their cymbals, drums, and triangles, and Mozart imitated that sound at the keyboard. The sonata is unusual: it opens with a set of variations, and none of its movements is in sonata form.
Why the first passage is level 6
That passage is level 6 rather than 5 because it runs fast figuration.
The finale of Mozart's A-major sonata imitates a Turkish military band, and its reading challenge is speed: sixteenth-note turns in the right hand over a steady left hand. Read the turn figures as one shape each rather than four separate notes. The march sections switch to loud broken octaves, which look busy on the page but repeat the same pattern.
Questions about Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March)
- How hard is Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March) to play?
- Its passages grade from level 6 to level 8 on Real Sight Reader's ten-level reading scale, so the full piece is intermediate to advanced reading. The hardest stretch is bars 9–24 at level 8.
- Is there an easy part of Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March) for beginners?
- Its easiest passage is level 6, so it suits a reader past the beginner stage. Start with bars 21–24 for the right hand alone, the level-6 passage in the reader at the top of this page; it is level 6 because it runs fast figuration.
- What key and time signature is Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March) in?
- The engraving on this page is in 2/4 time.
- Who composed Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March)?
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian classical (1756–1791). This is the finale of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, K.
- Can I practice Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March) online for free?
- Yes. The reader on this page plays any of the 6 graded passages from Rondo alla Turca (Turkish March) in your browser, with an on-screen keyboard or a MIDI keyboard, and marks every note as you play. No signup.
Every passage, easiest first
The reading release grades 6 distinct passages of this piece. Open any of them in the reader:
- Level 6
- bars 21–24 right hand
- Level 7
- bars 9–16 both hands · bars 9–12 both hands · bars 9–20 both hands · bars 13–16 both hands
- Level 8
- bars 9–24 both hands
More pieces to sight-read
Score: public-domain engraving from the corpus (pdmx), graded by the piano-reading-v2-20261001-mutopia-ly reading release.