Lost Mozart works are played on composer's own piano

Published on Sunday 2 August 2009 22:46

AN AUSTRIAN pianist yesterday performed two newly discovered compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for the first time in public.

Click here to see images of the performance

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 years old. Both pieces were transcribed in the writing of Mozart's father, Leopold.

Ulrich Leisinger, a Mozart researcher, said the young Mozart almost certainly asked his father to put the pieces to paper because he could not yet manage musical notation, and later made his own corrections.

"This was a young composer running riot to show what he was capable of," Mr Leisinger said. "The piece does contain real technical mistakes and clumsy moments that an old hand like Leopold Mozart would never have made.

"Neither the compositional style nor hasty correction-ridden handwriting are consistent with Leopold's authorship."

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 early and was composing from the age of five.

This is not the first time works by Mozart have resurfaced posthumously. 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.

• Click here to download the 'lost' Mozart pieces