Two pieces of music betraying the precocious talent and boundless ambition of their youthful composer were performed in Salzburg for the first time since experts identified them as the childhood creations of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The long-lost works, a five-minute concerto and a one-minute prelude found scrawled at the back of a notebook belonging to Mozart’s sister, shed new light on the inspirations of one of music’s most famed child prodigies.
Despite being recorded in his father Leopold’s handwriting, the fragments are believed “almost certainly” to be the work of at the budding composer at the age of just seven or eight.
Ulrich Leisinger, the scholar who rescued the pieces from centuries of oblivion, said the pieces — written hurriedly with the unfettered enthusiasm of an inexperienced genius — could not possibly have been the work of Mozart senior and must have been dictated to him by his eager young son.
“[These pieces] are just so weird. A more experienced composer would compose something that was difficult enough to make sense but not so difficult as to make it dangerous,” he said. “As a skilled composer Leopold would have been more refined and more economical with the presentation of his musical ideas than this daring young composer.”
Leisinger, head of research at the International Mozarteum Foundation, made the discovery when combing through the mess of jottings and unattributed musical notations which litter the yellowing pages of the book which Leopold had bought his daughter Nannerl to accompany her piano lessons.
Despite the fact that the notepad has been in the foundation’s possession since 1864, no one had ever noticed the two snatches of music which were on Monday the toast of Mozart’s birthplace. But such was their complexity that they reminded Leisinger of an anecdote he had heard about Wolfgang as a child.
A friend of the Mozart family, Andreas Schachtner, recalled visiting his friend Leopold in the 1760s and being baffled by an early musical effort by the composer’s infant son. At first, he said, the men had laughed at “what seemed such gobbledegook.
“But then his father began to observe the most important matter, the notes and music,” Schachtner said. “He stared long at the sheet, and then tears, tears of joy and wonder, fell from his eyes. ‘It is so very difficult that nobody could play it,’ Leopold said, to which Wolfgang replied: ‘That’s why it’s a concerto. You must practise it until you get it right.'”
Leisinger said the story matched perfectly with his discovery. “It confirms that the young composer was composing keyboard pieces like this at an early age,” he said. “These two pieces are in a sense the missing links [in Mozart’s early development]. They show how quick his evolution as a composer was.”
The two new fragments will be performed in concert for the first time in January next year. – guardian.co.uk