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Library unveils recently discovered Mozart score

A newly discovered music score by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is presented to the press on Thursday. The score, on just one page, has been authenticated by Austrian researchers. PHOTO: AFP

Music scholars were celebrating on Thursday after a library in France announced it had stumbled upon a previously unknown score by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The piece, scrawled on a sheet of paper the size of a text book in ink now barely legible, was described as one of the most important discoveries in decades.

Consisting of several bars of melody in D major and signed WA Mozart, it is believed to be the preliminary draft of a piece of church music that the composer did not complete.

For this reason, its discovery is all the more exciting, said Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the International Mozart Foundation (IMF) in Salzburg, who was asked by the French library to authenticate the document.

“It’s really important because a totally new piece by Mozart does not show up every year,” Leisinger said.

“Many sketches we find are the basic drafts of pieces we know, but this is one of the more rare specimens where Mozart, for whatever reason, didn’t carry it through,” he said.

Staff at the Jean Remy library in Nantes came across the yellowing piece of paper last year when they were sifting through their archives.

Although it had been catalogued as part of the institution’s collection in the 1800s, it had subsequently been forgotten for more than a century.

Having spent months analyzing the score, researchers at the IMF are sure it is an original Mozart, almost certainly composed in the last years of his life.

“There have been fewer than ten discoveries [of Mozart sketches] in the past 50 years,” Leisinger said. “An entirely new piece like this is very rare.”

The historic nature of the work leaves it open to multiple interpretations, said Jean-Louis Jossic, deputy cultural director of the city of Nantes.

“If we gave it to four, five or six different musicians, we would have ten different versions,” he said.

Christophe, a pianist from Nantes who has already been invited by the library to bring the notes to life, said the first part of the score consisted of about 15 bars of music in quadruple time.

“It’s a credo,” he told the Presse Ocean, a local newspaper. “There are ancient ways of writing and rhythms in it. You wouldn’t write like that nowadays. For instance, there are appoggiaturas where today we would use semiquavers.”
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