In September 1777, Mozart set out from Salzburg in the company of his mother Maria Anna, on the first of the many journeys he had undertaken without his father Leopold. It was to prove an ill-fated trip. Not only did he fail to gain the post he and his father hoped he might find away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Salzburg court, but Maria Anna would die in Paris, their ultimate destination. By the end of October, they had reached Mannheim, a city that boasted one of the most famous orchestras in Europe. It was Johann Baptist Wendling, the flutist of the orchestra, who procured for Mozart a commission from a wealthy Dutch merchant and amateur flutist Ferdinand Dejean to compose three easy flute concertos and a pair of flute quartets. Despite his dislike for the instrument Mozart accepted the commission, rapidly producing the first of the quartets, the Quartet in D major, K. 285. But Mozart seems rapidly to have tired of the idea; on February 14, 1778 he was forced to confess in a letter to his father that he had only completed two of the concertos (one of which he transcribed from the Oboe Concerto in C major, K. 314, composed in Salzburg the previous year) and three quartets. The mention of three quartets is curious since Dejean had called only for two. Was this just a slip of the pen, or was Mozart attempting to make the situation look better than it actually was (something he was not averse to doing with his father) by claiming the composition of a work that had not been written? Certainly no third quartet is known to exist from this period, the Quartet in C, K. 285b, once believed to have been the work in question, has now been firmly assigned to either 1781 or 1782. The confusion over Mozart's Mannheim flute quartets is further compounded by the fact that no autograph manuscript or reliable copy exist for the present quartet, which as it stands consists of only two movements, an Andante and Tempo di Minuetto. This apparently incomplete work was first published by Artaria in Vienna (1792) with a corrupt version of the Allegro of the D Major Quartet forming its opening movement, thus completing a complex scenario that has yet to be satisfactorily explained.

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