One of the most profound influences on the development of Mozart's style after he settled in Vienna was his introduction to the music of J.S. Bach. This he owed to the Viennese nobleman Baron Gottfried van Swieten, and enthusiastic collector of the music of both Bach and Handel. Mozart appears to have met van Swieten soon after he settled in Vienna in 1781. By the spring of the following year, he was regularly attending the Baron's Sunday morning artistic gatherings, as he makes clear in a letter addressed to his father on April 10, 1782—further telling Leopold that at these meetings "nothing is played but Handel and Bach." Concurrently, Mozart had begun to closely study of the fugues of members of the Bach family, not just those of Johann Sebastian, but also those of his sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann. Ten days after writing to his father, Mozart revealed that he was putting to such study to practical use, sending his sister Nannerl the present Prelude and Fugue in C major, which he tells us he had composed for his wife Constanze, who apparently "absolutely fell in love" with the fugues of Bach and Handel she heard (letter of April 20). The same letter also reveals something of Mozart's compositional technique at the time—he told Nannerl that he composed the fugue first (in his head, as usual), then wrote it down while he was thinking out the prelude. Constanze's love of fugal writing may well also account for the great archaic fugues in another work associated with her—the unfinished Mass in C Minor, K. 427, a work started later that year and intended as a votive mass of thanks for his marriage.

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