Mozart – Complete Sonatas For Keyboard And Violin vol 6

For some twenty-five years, between the ages of eight and thirty-two, Mozart’s oeuvre included sonatas for violin and piano. The earliest works, small-scale rococo trifles in which the violin played a subsidiary part and the keyboard (virtually certain to be a harpsichord at that date) was the star performer, date from the time of his first major tour through Europe. Leopold Mozart had four of these early sonatas published in Paris in 1764, two as opus 1 and two as opus 2. In the following year, he had another series of six sonatas published in London as opus 3. Yet another series of six sonatas, opus 4, written in the Hague by Wolfgang (and possibly by Leopold?) in 1766, appeared that same year, both there and in Amsterdam. Then Mozart’s production of violin and piano sonatas was interrupted by a twelve-year silence. Not until his stay in Mannheim in 1777 and 1778 would he complete four new sonatas, in which the violin’s role had grown considerably, offering a genuine partnership to the piano. In the summer of 1778, Mozart added two more new sonatas to the series of six Paris sonatas, and published the set there as Opus 1, as if he intended his mature oeuvre to begin at this point. Then, after another interval of three years, came the six sonatas published in 1781 as Opus 2 by Artaria in Vienna, Mozart’s new and ultimate place of residence. One of the pieces had been composed in Mannheim, and another presumably dated back to Salzburg. Mozart composed the other four sonatas in the summer of 1781 in Vienna. Four more violin sonatas, his last works in the genre, were composed, also in Vienna, between 1784 and 1788……