Composed 1778; 15 minutes

“I played as though I were the finest fiddler in all Europe,” Mozart wrote to his father from Munich. He had just played three of his piano concertos, a piano trio, and, as a finale, he then directed his B-flat Divertimento K. 287, where his skill on the violin took a private gathering by surprise. “You yourself do not know how well you play the violin,” Leopold Mozart wrote in reply. As one of the leading authorities on violin technique of his day, Leopold’s statement carries some weight. 

From October 30, 1777 through to the following spring, Mozart and his mother were in Mannheim, on their way to Paris. Mozart was hoping to find employment at the Mannheim court, in a city boasting what Leopold Mozart described as “unquestionably the finest orchestra in Europe.” No position was offered, although Mozart performed at court and had the support of several leading musicians. Instead, he found pupils to teach, commissions to fulfill, and private music-making to help widen his network. He also found love… with his future wife’s sister, soprano Aloysia Weber, much to his father’s consternation. 

In Mannheim, Mozart also began to write a collection of six ‘accompanied sonatas’ dedicating them to Maria Elisabeth, Electress of the Palatine. He continued to write them during the summer after reaching Paris. Five of the sonatas contain just two movements, with interest being sustained by the stylistic range of each movement. The A major sonata is the fourth of these so-called Palatine sonatas (though the fifth as published). Its lively gigue-like opening movement includes much interchange between the instruments, notably more so than in his earlier collections of sonatas. Mozart’s incentive to explore such varying textures and make the accompanying instrument less passive likely came from a set of violin sonatas by Dresden-based composer Joseph Schuster that he came across while in Mannheim. “They are not bad,” Mozart wrote to his sister, sending copies and describing them as duets for keyboard and violin. “If I stay on I shall write six myself in the same style, as they are very popular here.” 

Mozart playfully appears to break the prevailing meter of the first movement with a six-note across-the-beat descending figure as second subject. Then, as the all-too-brief development begins, he wittily inverts the figure from the very opening, simultaneously plunging it into the minor. The second movement is a set of six variations, during which the violin, obliged to sit out the first variation, increasingly asserts its independence in at least two of the six variations and is actively engaged elsewhere. The final triple-time variation nods back to the bucolic opening movement.