The history of the French horn as an orchestral instrument did not begin untilthe end of the seventeenth century. Because of its origin， the playing technique forthe instrument and the music written for it very much associated with hunting callsof the time. In addition to a rather limited amount of the hunting horn's availablenotes， orchestral horn players in the beginning of the eighteenth century borrowedthe trumpet's clarino technique， which utilizes high overtone partials in order to ob-tain more notes. By the end of the eighteenth century， however， a new playing tech-pique， where the player's right hand acts as various sized mutes and thus allowingfor full chromatic scales throughout the whole range of the French horn， saw its fullmaturity. Although Mozart wrote a number of solo pieces for those horn playerswho had capitalized the hand-stopping technique， he， just like any other composersof the time， called only for those notes that belong to the overtone partials in mostof his orchestral works. A small number of orchestral pieces， however， do containfew hand-stopped notes， of which many are in the passages where the horn istreated as a solo instrument. In addition， Mozart also utilized the hand-stopped notesin the context of the traditional horn parts. This paper seeks for possible motivationsfor Mozart to write hand-stopped notes in the places where he could have omittedthe stopped notes altogether or replaced them with the traditional open， non-stopped notes.