Violin Sonata in A major K.305 (1778)

Mozart discovered the potential of the violin sonata when he was passing through Munich on his way to Mannheim and Paris in 1777 and came across a set of duo sonatas by Joseph Schuster. He was so impressed by them that he sent a copy home to    his father and sister. “My main object in sending them to you,” he told them, “is that you may amuse yourselves à deux..” He also told them that he would write six himself “in the same style” - which must mean, for the first time in his violin sonatas, with the two instruments as equal partners. Of the seven violin sonatas in the new, post-Schuster style, five were written in Mannheim and two, K.304 in E minor and K.305 in A major in Paris,

The two Paris sonatas seem to have been intended as a pair – on the one hand the unhappy E minor and on the other hand its carefree anithesis in the contrasting but not unrelated key of A major. There is one momement of E minor at the beginning of the development section of the Allegro di molto, where the first subject appears in inversion, but this seems to be nothing but a macabre joke. The movement ends in great high spirits with exuberant scoring for both instrument in the coda. In accordance with convention, the last but one of the Andante grazioso variations – the fifth approached by an ironic piano cadenza – is in the minor. But in the circumstances the witty exaggerations make it difficult to hear it as anything but parody.