In the fall of 1777 Mozart left Salzburg in the company of his mother. Traveling via Munich and Augsburg, they arrived in Mannheim at the end of October. At the time Mannheim was the home of arguably the finest orchestra in Europe, boasting among an elite corps of wind players such names as the famous flautist Johann-Baptiste Wendling. It appears to have been Wendling who gained for Mozart the commission to compose three flute concertos and four flute quartets on behalf a Dutch amateur, Ferdinand Dejean. Despite his professed dislike of the instrument, Mozart responded enthusiastically to the commission in a letter to his father, doubtless partially in an attempt to deflect paternal criticism of the length of his stay in Mannheim. In the event, only one wholly new concerto was completed, the other Mozart supplied to Dejean (K314 in D) being an arrangement of an oboe concerto he had written for the Mannheim oboist Giuseppe Ferlendis. The Andante in C has been dated from much the same period as the concertos, and may have been designed as either an alternative central movement for the Flute Concerto in G, K413, or possibly as a slow movement for the third concerto Mozart failed to write for Dejean.



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