It is hardly surprising that Mozart composed a number of sonatas for violin and piano – or rather, for piano with violin. In the duo sonatas that Mozart composed throughout his career, there is a constant development of equality in the partnership, which initially placed the burden entirely on the keyboard and left the string part almost optional.
In the summer of 1777, Mozart’s simmering feud with his Salzburg employer, the Archbishop Colloredo, came to full boil. The composer asked Colloredo to be released from his job as concertmaster, and the archbishop responded by dismissing both Wolfgang and his father Leopold, the deputy Kapellmeister. Leopold remained in Salzburg, but Wolfgang and his mother almost immediately set out on a tour of prospective employers. After stops in Munich and Augsburg, they arrived in Mannheim, then one of the major musical centers of Europe.
“I send my sister herewith six duets for clavicembalo [keyboard] and violin by Schuster, which I have often played here,” Wolfgang wrote to his father from Mannheim. “They are not bad. If I stay on I shall write six myself in the same style, as they are very popular.”
Mozart did stay on and he did compose a group of four violin sonatas, adding three more when he moved on to Paris. He gathered six of these seven sonatas together for publication in the City of Light, where they were issued in 1778 as – inaccurately and irrelevantly – his Opus 1. Dedicated to the Electress of the Palatine, they are known as the “Palatine” Sonatas.
The one sonata from Mannheim that Mozart held out was this one, K. 296, which he had written for the piano-playing teenaged daughter of a Mannheim official in whose house he stayed. He saved it until the summer of 1781, when he pulled together another set of six sonatas for publication in his new home, Vienna.
Here is violinist Pinchas Zukerman to play Mozart’s Sonata K.296:
