A letter from Mozart to his father in July 1782, four days after the successful first performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, attests to Mozart's serious attempts to share in the lucrative yet highly-competitive market for Harmoniemusik arrangements. A furore was caused in 1977 by the discovery of a corresponding Harmoniemusik in the collections of the Schwarzenberg Chapel in Bohemia's Český Krumlov. In 1984 Bastiaan Blomhert came across an unusually interesting and superior arrangement in the Princely Fürstenberg Archive in Donaueschingen. Blomhert's exhaustive comparison with the working methods of other important arrangers of the time did not reveal any compelling correlations, and his hunch - that the Donaueschingen Harmoniemusik of Die Entführung aus dem Serail was probably a transcript of the lost Mozart arrangement - has since achieved broad consensus amongst researchers.

The wind ensemble La Scintilla dei Fiati is composed of members of the ‘Orchestra La Scintilla’ at the Zurich Opera.