Partita in A minor for solo flute (Bach)

Its date of composition is uncertain, though on the basis of its advanced playing technique, which is more demanding than in the flute part for the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, for example, it must have been written after 1723.

The title in the only surviving 18th-century manuscript is "Solo p[our une] flûte traversière par J. S. Bach".

The discoverer of the sole surviving manuscript, Karl Straube, believed it to be an autograph and this view was accepted by Alfred Einstein.

Although their names are unknown, one appears to be identical with the principal scribe of another manuscript, P 267 (containing the violin sonatas and partitas, BWV 1001–1006), which places this part of the copy of the Partita in the first half of the 1720s.

On the basis of watermarks and textual criticism, the greater part of the manuscript was probably copied in Leipzig in 1723–1724, while the copyist of the first five lines of the Partita suggest it may have been begun slightly earlier, between 1722 and 1723 in Köthen.