The drama “La finta giardiniera” (KV 196) occupies a special position among Mozart's works insofar as it is the only Mozart opera to have survived in two authentic text versions, one Italian and one German. We do not know for sure who the not yet 19-year-old Salzburg composer was commissioned to compose for the Munich court with his respected “Ensemble die opera buffa” for the carnival season, perhaps the Bishop of Chiemsee Ferdinand Christoph Graf Waldburg-Zeil . The Munich court should have made the choice of the material itself.

This piano reduction is based on the edition presented by Rudolph Angermüller and Dietrich Berke in 1978 as part of the New Mozart Edition (NMA). The tradition is incomplete; the autograph of the first act was probably lost during Mozart's lifetime. Mozart's autograph of the second and third acts only became accessible again after the NMA edition was published; it was used for this new edition of the piano reduction and the NMA text was corrected wherever necessary due to different autograph readings.