“Her Majesty the Empress was very amiable to us,” wrote Mozart's father from Vienna in 1773, “but that was all.” Mozart's third visit to the Austrian capital had the same purpose as most of his journeys: to secure some sort of appointment at court, and, failing that, to make some money. Like the other journeys, this one would end in disappointment.

Just before their return home to Salzburg, his father wrote: “That the money I had with me is now all gone to the D-- you can well imagine…. Wolfgang has nothing to write as he has nothing to do, so is going round the room like a dog with fleas.”

After three months in Vienna, Mozart spent over a year in Salzburg before his next tour--to Munich for the production of his opera La Finta Giardiniera (K. 196). During that time, he wrote four symphonies, including K. 201, which he finished on April 6, 1774. He was eighteen years old.

Most of the commentators find a new maturity in Mozart's symphonic style in the work. Joan Brown detects “none of the unsureness of youth.” Alfred Einstein writes: “The strings become wittier, the winds lose everything that is simply noisy, the figuration drops everything merely conventional.”

“Astonishing” is Georges de Saint-Foix's word for K. 201, the third and last of Mozart's A major symphonies, “a symphony that may be considered one of Mozart's instrumental masterpieces, one in which he is already completely himself.”

—Program Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2022.