Oh, good. Never enough Mozart.
| A video of the September 21st performance of the short piece can be watched here. The scorcan be viewed here. A sweet little bit of juvenilia. |
[REGNUM] The main news of September in the world of culture and art was a discovery by the Leipzig Library. In the middle of the month, a serenade by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, unknown for 260 years, was discovered in its archives.
On September 21, excited queues of people formed outside the elegant building of the Leipzig Opera House, eager to be the first to hear Mozart's string trio, the serenade "Serenate ex C" - "Ganz kleine Nachtmusik" ("Little Night Music") performed by students of the Leipzig J. S. Bach School of Music. Two violins and a cello were heard.
There were too many guests, not all of them could even get into the theater foyer, so the musicians played three times. The last time - on the porch of the Opera. At the same time, a more intimate, but actually world premiere took place in the composer's homeland, in Salzburg, Austria, two days earlier.
The phenomenon of Mozart is explained by many factors: the cliche of "child genius" that has become firmly entrenched in him, his incredible creative fertility, the fact that he became one of the three icons of musical classicism... But above all, Mozart was and remains a pop star. The same idol, adored by the European mass public in the era of romanticism, was Franz Liszt, and in the 20th century Freddie Mercury.
Mozart was also lucky with his producer, who was his own father, who was busy with European tours for the young talent. Thanks to this, his name was known to almost all of Europe.
In the modern world, anyone, even the most distant from academic music, has certainly heard Mozart's music - in movies, advertisements and various kinds of videos. Scientists, in turn, are finding out whether the composer's works, as the "healed" claim, really cure allergies and mental illnesses.
Whether this is true is unknown. But one thing is clear: Mozart's music is light and airy, even the late symphonies and the mysterious opera "The Magic Flute", shrouded in Masonic secrets, do not seem to ordinary people to be "complex music for professionals". The only exception is the controversial and enigmatic requiem, to which Alexander Pushkin added mystery with his little drama.
"A LITTLE CHARMING SERENADE"
The trio score discovered in Leipzig has, of course, raised questions among musicologists: it is not so rare in the world to find notes of unknown pieces and try to attribute them to geniuses, insists the leading Mozart scholar, specialist of the Salzburg House of Mozart Ulrich Leisinger. But at the moment there is no doubt - this is a work by Mozart.
"Absolutely charming!" Leisinger added in comments to the media.
More reserved in her emotions on camera, Leipzig library director Susanne Metz agrees: experts really do not doubt that it is Mozart. But it is always worth being careful.
The discovered work is a seven-part piece, a minuet with multiple repetitions. The trio was found in a collection by musician and musicologist Karl Ferdinand Becker, to whom German music owes much of its painstaking systematization. Becker not only wrote canonical articles for German musicology on various academic composers, but also diligently collected collections and reference books that are still actively used by German music schools.
According to researchers, the discovered serenade was written by the composer in the 1760s, when he was 10–13 years old. Mozart had not yet become a student at the Bologna Academy or a Knight of the Golden Spur, but had already begun to write his first sonatas.
The discovered notes are a copy made from a manuscript presumably in 1780, and are now included in a new edition of the Köchel catalogue, a chronological complete list of the composer's works, which was developed and maintained by the staff of the Mozarteum in Salzburg.
DEDICATION TO A FRIEND AND NOTES SAVED FROM FIRE
Musical works are most often discovered completely by accident - during fires, fund moves and, of course, in private collections of the heirs of the lucky ones who received the work as a gift, but did not appreciate the scale of the personality of their contemporary and comrade in time.
In 2005, Saxony was shocked by the discovery of a previously unknown vocal work by Bach, which he dedicated to the Duke of Saxony, George I Ludwig, in 1713. The Weimar library of Duchess Anna Amalia, housed in a 16th-century castle, was on fire, but the score was among the papers removed from it shortly before the fire.
Bach's organ composition Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns haelt ("Where the Lord God is not with us") was discovered by scientists from the Martin Luther University in Halle in 2008 at an auction, where it was put up for auction under the authorship of the 19th century organist Wilhelm Rust. The score turned out to be a whole century older.
In 2017, literally on the eve of the anniversary of the Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich, the play "Impromptu" was found in the personal collection of the People's Artist of the RSFSR, violist Vadim Borisovsky, a friend of Shostakovich. It was immediately studied by specialists from the Main Archival Administration of Moscow and the authorship was confirmed.
It turned out that the composer had simply given a small piece to a friend, signing it: "To dear Alexander Mikhailovich, in memory of our acquaintance. D. Shostakovich 2/V 1931, Leningrad." The piece was in his personal documents. The only mystery is why the notes ended up with Borisovsky, and not with the addressee - another viola player, Honored Artist of the RSFSR Alexander Ryvkin.
UNKNOWN HOLMES AND CEZANNE BEHIND THE WALLPAPER
Such unexpected successes also happen with great literary finds. In 2015, the British historian Walter Elliott found in his attic a manuscript of a previously unknown story by Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes, which a friend had once given him as a gift.
In 2014, an unknown poem by American poet Walt Whitman was found by Wendy Katz, an art history professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. She was working in the archives of the Library of Congress and came across a newspaper printed in the 19th century. One of the pages contained a poem titled “To Brian, Nature’s Poet,” published when Whitman was not yet a recognized classic.
At the same time, discoveries can also be the result of painstaking work: while sorting through the archive of one of the main English-language science fiction writers, Herbert Wells, in 2016, the editor of The Strand magazine, Andrew Jully, found a previously unpublished story, “The Haunted Ceiling.”
As for painting, finds happen even more often. Sometimes works by masters of the past are found in the possession of collectors who, either unknowingly or intentionally, do not report that they own a masterpiece. Last year, this happened with two miniature portraits by Rembrandt, a caricature by Claude Monet and a portrait of Chiara Fancelli by Raphael. An even more amazing story happened with a work by Paul Cezanne, which was found under the wallpaper in an old house.