Violin Concerto No. 3 (Mozart)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major, known by the catalog number K. 216, carries a nickname its composer gave it himself. In a letter to his father, Mozart called it the "Strasbourg Concerto". He wrote it in Salzburg in 1775, at the age of nineteen. That name is the first puzzle the piece poses: why Strasbourg? What does a local dance from that city have to do with a Salzburg concerto? And why does this work, out of all five violin concertos Mozart ever wrote, contain a detail found nowhere else in the set?

• 2. The Strasbourg Name

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  Researchers tracing the origin of the "Strasbourg" nickname point to the third movement's Allegretto section. Buried inside the rondo finale is a melody that scholars identify as a local dance already circulating in other composers' works. The same tune had appeared earlier as a musette-imitating theme in a symphony by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf. A musette is a kind of bagpipe-inflected pastoral style, and the Allegretto section carries that flavoring into Mozart's finale. The label stuck to the whole concerto because of that single embedded melody.

• 3. A Borrowed Aria

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  The first movement, an Allegro in sonata form, opens with the full orchestra playing a G major theme. That theme carries a close resemblance to Aminta's aria "Aer tranquillo e dì sereni" from Mozart's own opera Il re pastore. Mozart was recycling his own material, drawing on vocal writing he already trusted. From G major the movement pushes to the dominant key of D major, then pivots to D minor, explores further keys without settling, and eventually returns to G major in the recapitulation. The solo violin and the accompaniment carry this as a bright, back-and-forth conversation rather than a solo showcase.

• 4. The Flute Exception

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  The slow middle movement, an Adagio in D major, holds a distinction unique across all five of Mozart's violin concertos. It is the only movement in any of them where a pair of flutes replaces the oboes. The oboes are marked tacet, meaning they sit silent, while the flutes step in to color the texture. The orchestra states the main theme, and the violin answers it one octave higher. A dance-like wind motif then appears in A major. The violin takes that material and steers it toward A sharp instead of A natural, briefly pulling the harmony into B minor before resolving back through A major and settling in D major after the cadenza.

• 5. Recordings Across Generations

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  Yehudi Menuhin and conductor George Enescu recorded the concerto with the Orchestre symphonique de Paris in 1935, one of the earliest documented interpretations. Arthur Grumiaux paired with Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra for a vinyl recording in 1962. Anne-Sophie Mutter recorded it with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in February 1978, a performance released on Deutsche Grammophon. Itzhak Perlman and James Levine followed with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1983, also for Deutsche Grammophon. Hilary Hahn brought Gustavo Dudamel and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra to the work in 2007. More recently, Isabelle Faust recorded it with Giovanni Antonini and the period-instrument ensemble Il Giardino Armonico for Harmonia Mundi in 2016.