The extraordinary popularity of Mozart's works composed during his years in Vienna (1781–91) is a product of, and a factor contributing towards, the intense public fascination with the man and his music. Scholarly attention to Mozart, no less remarkable in volume and intensity, is also motivated by, and is a motivating factor for, the continued allure of his music as a topic for intellectual investigation. The explosion of secondary literature on Mozart in the last fifty years or so, in musicological sub-disciplines as diverse as source studies, history and context, gender studies, and music analysis (to name but a few major areas), sets the composer in as sharp a critical perspective, perhaps, as any composer before or since. Such fertile scholarly investigation, of course, feeds an insatiable scholarly appetite – the more information and interpretation we are afforded, the more we crave. Equally – and perhaps more surprisingly – the proliferation of diverse standpoints, methodologies and approaches leaves major areas of Mozart scholarship, and basic questions about his music, conspicuously under-represented, or even misrepresented.

One fundamental area of investigation eliciting little systematic attention in recent years – and one that will provide the focus for this monograph – is the development of Mozart's instrumental style in his Viennese works of 1781–91. While the absence of up-to-date book-length volumes focussing on stylistic development that traverse the generic boundaries of Mozart's instrumental output may not be significant in itself, the absence becomes more striking when recent advances in our collective appreciation of the aesthetic and historical contexts of Mozart's Viennese works are factored into the equation.