The Clements Blog
...and now some new Mozart has been discovered too
by Tim Benjamin
Sunday, 2nd September 2012 |
Just a few weeks after we reported the news that an unknown piece by Brahms had been discovered, another new piece by one of the great composers has been found. This time it's music by an 11-year-old Mozart that has been unearthed by Hildegard Herrmann-Schneider, a lecturer at Innsbruck University in Austria. He was compiling some handwritten pages for a catalogue of preserved music when he came across a handwritten composition for piano inside a book of music estimated to date from around 1780.
Experts from The Mozart Foundation in Salzburg have confirmed that the music "is clearly written by the young Wolfgang Mozart", and that "stylistically, the piece matches the others you can find from the young Mozart".
Mozart began composing at a very early age – around 5 years old – and is of course remembered as one of the great 18th century composers, although there have been claims that some of his earliest pieces were in fact written by his father, Leopold Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was also a very gifted keyboard player, and this piece for solo piano is indeed very tricky and might have been written by the young Mozart as a showpiece.
Here's a video of a piece that's definitely by (a grown-up) Mozart, his Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra – this is the Rondo, and it's performed on instruments similar to those of Mozart's day, which is why some of them (particularly the clarinet!) might not look very familiar.
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