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Unknown Mozart piece discovered in Leipzig
A piece of music in the Leipzig Municipal Libraries has been identified as a previously unknown work composed by a very young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The manuscript of “Serenate in C” was found in the library’s Carl Ferdinand Becker collection by researchers from the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg working on a new edition of the Köchel Catalogue, the comprehensive cross-referenced catalogue of Mozart’s oeuvre that has been published since 1862.
The manuscript is not in Mozart’s hand. It is a copy that was written around 1780 with dark brown ink on white handmade paper. It was then bound in a hard-cover volume. It is not signed, but the copyist attributed it to “Wolfgang Mozart.” The lack of his middle name suggests Mozart wrote the piece before 1769 (he began adding “Amadeo” to his autograph after his first visit to Italy in 1769). The style of the composition is also typical of his work in the 1760s. Mozart was born in 1756, so he would have been no more than 13 at the outset when he wrote “Serenate in C.”
The work is a trio in C major for two violins and a bass. Just 12 minutes long, it consists of seven miniature movements for the string trio.
For Ulrich Leisinger, the head of research at the International Mozarteum Foundation and editor of the latest version of Köchel, this Trio is a significant piece in the mosaic of Mozart’s music: “Until now the young Mozart has been familiar to us chiefly as a composer of keyboard music and of arias and sinfonias but we know from a list drawn up by Leopold Mozart that he wrote many other chamber works in his youth, all of them unfortunately lost. It looks as if – thanks to a series of favourable circumstances – a complete string trio has survived in Leipzig. The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the Trio specially for her and for her name day.”
The newly-discovered piece debuted Saturday at the Leipzig Opera.
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