Mozart: Rondo in A Minor, K. 511
Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Composed: 11 March 1787
Recording: "Mozart: The Piano Sonatas"
Pianist: Leon Mccawley
(Description taken from wikipedia.org)
"Mozart recorded the completion of the Rondo in his personal thematic catalog on 11 March 1787; he was age 31 at the time and had only recently returned from a triumphant journey to Prague, where he witnessed great success for a new production of his 1786 opera The Marriage of Figaro, for his Symphony No. 38, and for his own solo piano performances. notes some other major works of this stage in Mozart's life: the Rondo shortly preceded the beginning of work on Don Giovanni; and instrumental pieces from 1787 include the Third and Fourth String Quintets as well as the string serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
No musical sketches for the Rondo survive. This is not surprising, since as Ulrich Konrad has noted, none of the many surviving Mozart sketches are for solo keyboard works; apparently Mozart felt no need to sketch in his native performing medium. Simon Keefe even suggests that the Rondo was not created through ordinary musical composition but rather was improvised on the spot, perhaps before an audience in Prague during his trip there (January-February 1787), or at a Vienna concert on 11 February 1787.
No record survives of Mozart having premiered the completed Rondo in public. Aside from Keefe's suggestion above, a different guess is entertained by Scheideler: "Since subscription [i.e., benefit] concerts of two of [Mozart's] musician friends took place shortly after he completed the work (that of the oboist Friedrich Ramm on 14 March and of the bass singer Ludwig Karl Fischer on 21 March), and works by Mozart were ascertainably performed there ... it seems plausible to assume that the Rondo in A minor was also given its first performance at one of these concerts."