Bassoon Concerto (Mozart)

Bassoon Concerto
by W. A. Mozart
The young composer, a 1777 copy of a lost painting
Key	B-flat major
Catalogue	K. 191/186e
Genre	Concerto
Style	Classical period
Composed	1774 (1774)
Movements	Three (Allegro, Andante ma Adagio, Rondo: tempo di menuetto)
Scoring	Bassoon orchestra

The Bassoon Concerto in B-flat major, K. 191/186e, is a bassoon concerto written in 1774 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It is the most often performed and studied piece in the entire bassoon repertory.^[1] Nearly all professional bassoonists will perform the piece at some stage in their career, and it is probably the most commonly requested piece in orchestral auditions – it is usually requested that the player perform excerpts from the concerto's first two movements in every audition.

Although the autograph score is lost, the exact date of its completion is known: 4 June 1774.^[2]

Mozart wrote the bassoon concerto when he was 18 years old, and it was his first concerto for a wind instrument.^[3] Although it is believed that it was commissioned by an aristocratic amateur bassoon player Thaddäus Freiherr von Dürnitz, who owned seventy-four works by Mozart, this is a claim that is supported by little evidence.^[4] Scholars believe that Mozart may have written five^[5] bassoon concertos, but that only the first has survived.^{[better source needed]}