As reported in a dispatch from Agence France-Presse, taken up by The Duty Last Thursday, seven movements for string trio with a total duration of about 12 minutes were found in a library collection in Leipzig, Germany. But this Whole little night music (“A Little Night Music”) is not the only unpublished work by Mozart recognized by the Mozarteum and, above all, not the only recent Mozartian discovery.
The news is rushing around Mozart, a composer who died in 1791. The reappearance of the trio movements in Leipzig was orchestrated at the right time by the press release of the Leipzig municipal libraries. Few people wondered how an early work “from the mid-to-late 1760s” (Mozart was born in 1756) could have found such a clever marketing title so quickly and, also, performers in Salzburg on the very evening of the press release.
In fact, the news largely overshadowed the attribution to Mozart, on September 8, of a manuscript found in Graz, Austria, of the “Milanese Variations” for piano.
These variations are considered to have been composed around the time of the marriage of Archduke Ferdinand Karl, fourth son of Empress Maria Theresa, on 15 October 1771. Mozart, who was 15 years old, had dedicated the opera to him on the occasion. Ascanio in AlbaThe “Milanese Variations” (perhaps a reference to the “Milanese Quartets” of the time), which are said to have been composed at the same time, arrived at the Archives in Graz in 2005 as part of the “Lannoy collection”.
A first in 60 years
They had been noticed, but their authenticity was considered doubtful, despite the indication “Wolfg. Amade Mozart” at the head of the manuscript, because Mozart had never passed through Graz. But the music historian Paul Duncan of the Austrian National Archives was able to establish that the manuscript (1791) of the “Variations” came from the workshop of the Viennese copyist Johannes Traeg and that it had therefore perhaps been made during Mozart’s lifetime.
The stories of Graz and Leipzig intersect, because the news here is not necessarily about “discoveries”, but about attributions to Mozart, after in-depth work by authorized bodies on manuscripts discovered previously. And the news and information are jostling each other these days, especially since the new edition of the Köchel catalogue, which authenticates and lists Mozart’s works, was published at the end of last week.
Ludwig von Köchel, who established this classification in 1862, has worthy successors, who work in conjunction with the Mozarteum in Salzburg. The Köchel catalogue was revised and revised in 1905, 1937 and 1964. This new publication is therefore a fifth version, at the peak of current knowledge, which includes an important new feature. The works that had not previously been numbered in the main catalogue (they were Anhangthat is, addendum, or deest, i.e. of doubtful authenticity) were all catalogued in their own right. “As a result, 95 new numbers could be assigned to compositions that had never had a number in the main part of the catalogue, starting with KV 627,” writes the editorial team.
Consulting these “new Köchel” is nevertheless a little disappointing, because one finds little substantial there; alternative tunes, but also compositions of dubious origin and missing scores. Not sure that assigning a number to something one does not have clarifies the point!
On the other hand, the Mozarteum has devoted considerable effort to putting the new catalogue online, a digitalisation whose search engine is very efficient.
As for the new works, Trio And Variationswe will see if, once the curiosity effect has passed, they will prevail.