A companion work to the popular set of Variations for piano (12) in C major on "Ah, vous dirai-je maman" K. 265 (K. 300e), the E flat Variations are also based on a French tune. The origination of the theme is unknown, but it has been suggested that the popular, rustic nature of the tune indicates an air from one of the "village operas" which became popular in France in the wake of Rousseau's Le Devin du Village (1752), the source of Mozart's own Bastien and Bastienne, K. 50. As with K. 265, the present work has traditionally been assigned to the summer of 1778, the disastrous period spent in the Paris during which Mozart's mother died. More recent research now dates both sets to Mozart's early months in Vienna. Here again the naive innocence of the theme is treated to a series of often virtuoso variants (Variation 7, for instance) before Mozart brings back the original theme to die away pianissimo in a short coda. An announcement by the music dealer Lorenz Lausch in the Weiner Zeitung of April 2 advertized the sale of the variations along with two other sets based on French tunes, K. 264 and K. 354.

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