Andante in C major, K.315

The Andante in C major is one of the pieces supplied to the Dutch amateur flautist Ferdinand Dejean who commissioned Mozart to write three concertos and four quartets when the composer was in Mannheim in 1778. Mozart’s excuse for not completing the commission - he wrote a new Flute Concerto in C, recycled his Oboe Concerto as a Flute Concerto in D, and finished only three of the quartets - was that the flute was an “instrument I cannot bear.” That’s what he told his father anyway. Listening to this Andante, which was probably written as an alternative slow movement for the Concerto in C, it is difficult to believe that the future composer of The Magic Flute had such a dislike for the instrument. Certainly, he goes straight to its heart here, flattering its partiality for a finely poised line, its facility for melodic decoration and, in the harmonically enterprising middle section, its chromatic fluency.

It is a little unfortunate in the present circumstances that Mozart was not very keen on the harp either. But, as we know from the Flute and Harp Concerto he wrote a few months after the Andante in C major, a combination of the two instruments was something he was not unwilling to contemplate.