This piece is very short (only 10 bars), and there’s not much to say about it. It was apparently written when Mozart was five and it’s nice. It’s got these little baroque trills, and it’s a cheerful little thing that finishes on what Wikipedia calls “a simple authentic cadence”, which is a cadence (“a melodic or harmonic configuration that creates a sense of resolution”1) that falls from V to I.
To my ear, it has an emotional structure like this:
- bars 1-2: “Hey, I’m going to do this thing.”
- bars 3-4: “Oh, I’m not sure, there’s something I hadn’t thought of.”
- bars 5-6: “Well maybe I won’t.”
- bars 8-10: “You know what, I’m going to try anyway; okay, let’s start.”
I think it’s a good way to start this series of working my way through the Kochel catalogue.