K616 is the last of three works Mozart composed during the final year of his life for a mechanical organ or musical clock. It was almost certainly the result of a commission from Count Joseph Deym von Strzitez, an eccentric Viennese aristocrat who had recently opened a monument dedicated to the memory of the late Field-Marshal Laudon. Deym owned several curious mechanical organs powered by clockwork, one of which was designed to play suitably solemn music in the mausoleum. It was Deym that Mozart composed the Adagio and Allegro in F Minor, and although there is no certainty that K616 and the Fantasia in F were also composed for the Count, it is highly unlikely that Mozart would have received such an unusual commission from elsewhere. Mozart entered the work in his catalog on 4 May 1791 as "an andante for a cylinder in a small organ". Less solemn and complex than its two companions, K616 possibly reflects Mozart's increasing irritation with a commission that obviously bored him from the outset (Letter to his wife of October 1790).



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