SALZBURG – An Austrian pianist performed two works newly discovered to have been by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for the first time in public yesterday in a house where the master composer once lived.
The concerto movement and a prelude were originally judged by their archivist, the International Mozarteum Foundation, to be anonymous works. However, further analysis determined they had been composed by Mozart when he was seven or eight.
Both works were transcribed in the writing of Mozart’s father Leopold, but the analysis showed he must have done so from what his prodigy child was playing on a piano, the foundation’s Mozart researcher, Ulrich Leisinger, said.
He said the young Mozart almost certainly asked his father to put the pieces to paper because he could not yet write musical notation. He later made his own corrections.
“This was a young composer running riot to show what he was capable of. The piece does contain real technical mistakes and clumsy moments that an old hand like Leopold Mozart would never have made,” Leisinger said.
Both pieces were played by Florian Birsak on Mozart’s own piano in the Salzburg house where he lived for several years as a young man.
Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and died in Vienna in 1791. He began playing piano at an early age and was composing from the age of five, going on to write more than 600 works and becoming one of the most prolific and popular of classical composers.
Last year a library in Nantes, France, reported finding that a musical score that had been donated by a private collector at the end of the 19th century was a Mozart original rather than a copy as earlier thought. – (Reuters)