1.Allegro

 

2.Andante

 

3.Rondeau

 

 Mozart seems not to have played the violin in public after the 1770s, and his preference in chamber music with friends was to take the viola part; however, all his music for violin and orchestra as well, of course, as the many sonatas, is the work of an active and superb violinist. Mozart was at that time in the musical household of Count Hieronymus Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg, a patron of exemplary boorishness. (This unhappy relationship came to a violent end—literally, with Colorado's Chief Steward kicking Mozart down the stairs of the archiepiscopal palace—in 1781.) We cannot be absolutely sure that Mozart wrote this concerto for himself, but it seems probable.

 A name often mentioned in this context is that of Colloredo's Neapolitan concertmaster Antonio Brunetti; Brunetti undoubtedly played the Mozart concertos later, and the composer wrote various pieces for him, but since he joined the Salzburg establishment only in March 1776 he cannot have been the first recipient of the concertos. Mozart's biographer Stanley Sadie proposes another possible candidate, Andrä Kolb, an excellent amateur player in Salzburg and a friend of the Mozart family.

The D major Concerto is the fourth of the five that Mozart wrote in Salzburg in 1775. After a first movement in the eighteenth century's most charming‑filled military manner comes an andante that is the very essence of yielding tenderness and grace. The finale is the most varied of the three movements.

 Among its themes is one—the musette‑like tune with the drone accompaniment—that was common currency at the time. It shows up in a symphony by Dittersdorf, where it is referred to as the Strasbourg dance (Mozart also referred to this as his Strasbourg Concerto), and Mozart himself used it again in a set of contredanses completed in January 1777.