‘Missing link’ work of Mozart, aged 8, played for first time in Salzburg

Roger Boyes

The musical world is hailing it as Mozart’s missing link: two newly discovered pieces of piano music that could form a bridge between the composer’s very early works and his mature compositions.

They were written when he was 8 years old and were performed for the first time in Salzburg yesterday on Wolfgang Amadeus’s original piano in his family home. According to musicologists, this must have been how the two pieces — a four-minute concerto and a one-minute prelude — came about, with the boy playing the music and his father sitting alongside and noting it down.

“This was a young musician showing off everything that he could do,” said Ulrich Leisinger, of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg. “You break into a sweat if you try to imitate what this boy could play when he was 8 or 9 years old.”

The pieces were found in Nannerl’s Notenbuch, a musical notebook compiled for Mozart’s five-year-older sister Maria Anna, nicknamed Nannerl, by their father, Leopold. The notebook, designed to help Nannerl in her musical studies, contains 18 pieces, most of them attributed to Leopold or anonymous composers. However, researchers at the Mozarteum, which owns the notebook, grew suspicious about the musical structure of the pieces — they were far too extravagant for Leopold, yet were written in his hand.

“The soloist has to cross hands and jump wildly over the keyboard,” said Mr Leisinger, pointing out that this was not Leopold’s style at all. “A contemporary performer like Lang Lang will certainly take joy in playing these pieces, but much of this virtuoso hocus-pocus was unnecessary for the essential musical idea. Moreover, there are technical errors in the composition and some clumsy moments which an old hand like Leopold would never have committed.”

The Mozarteum concluded that “in all probability, bordering on certainty”, Leopold simply wrote down and corrected what his son had dreamed up.

Wolfgang had been composing since the age of 5 but by the age of 8 he had still not mastered notation; that was left to his father. Mozart composed more than 620 works before his death in 1791, aged 35.

Supporting evidence for Wolfgang Amadeus’s authorship of the two pieces, Concerto in G major and Prelude for piano in G major, comes in a documented anecdote. A year after his son’s death, Leopold discussed the concerto with his old friend Johann Andreas Schachtner, the Salzburg court trumpeter.

According to Schachtner’s written account, Leopold told his son: “Look at this piece, all duly notated, but unusable because it is so difficult that no one could play it.”

Wolfgang replied: “That’s why it’s a concerto, you just have to practise it for as long as it takes to master.”

The importance of the concerto in particular is that it marks a new sophistication and musical ambition. “It is an important link between the miniature pieces in the Notenbuch and the great forms of Mozartian instrumental works which occupied the young Mozart from 1763,” Mr Leisinger said.

The pieces, played yesterday by the Salzburg pianist Florian Birsak, are to be orchestrated by Robert D. Levin, the Harvard professor.

“We knew that the Mozart children had stupendous technique, but in this concerto we have concrete proof for the first time," said Levin. "It is a bit crazy what the composer demands of the performer with its breakneck passages, the crossing of hands and its wild leaps.”

Levin’s reconstructed orchestration, for harpsichord and strings, is expected to be premiered in January 2010. A harpsichord rendition of the two pieces by Birsak can be accessed at www. mozarteum.at.

The infant composer

At 3, Mozart showed interest in the piano. According to his sister he “often spent much time at the clavier, picking out thirds, which he was always striking, and his pleasure showed that it sounded good”

At 4, Mozart learnt his first piano piece — a scherzo by Georg Christoph Wagenseil — in less than half an hour. His father wrote on his manuscript book: “This piece was learnt by Wolfgangerl on 24 January 1761, three days before his fifth birthday, between 9 and 9:30 in the evening”

At 5, he composed his first pieces, including an Andante in C and Allegro in C, both of which were 15 seconds long

At 6, Mozart played for Maximilian III Joseph, Elector of Bavaria. He performed his first public concert that year at Linz in northern Austria

At 7, he met Johann Christian Bach in London. They were later to be musical rivals

Source: The Mozart Project