ORIGINS

These three sonatas, which belong to the journey Mozart undertook with his mother to Mannheim and Paris (September 1777–January 1779), were eventually published as ‘Opus IV’ in about 1782 by Franz Joseph Heina in Paris. In fact, Mozart may have offered them to Heina shortly before his departure from the French capital in the autumn of 1778, by which time he certainly had other recent works ready for publication there, including the clavier variations, Je suis Lindor, K.354, as well as the clavier and violin sonatas, K.301–6, and the ‘Paris’ symphony, K.297, published by the rival firm of Sieber. The publication of these solo sonatas is a matter we will return to in due course.

All three were evidently composed within a period of less than a year, K.309 (C major) and K.311 (D major) being complete (probably) by mid-November 1777; the more famous A minor Sonata, K.310, was, according to the autograph, written in Paris in the summer of the following year. Virtually nothing else of substance is known of the origins of K.310 and 311. Mozart made no reference at all to the former in his letters, while in the case of the latter just a couple of brief references to a sonata, apparently promised to Mlle Josepha Freysinger during Mozart's brief stay in Munich (24 September – 11 October 1777), occur in two letters to his cousin, Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, who lived in Augsburg.