Newly-found Mozart score to get French performance
A newly-found score by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is to get its first
public performance next Thursday in western France, where it lay
undiscovered in a library archive for over a century.
Dating from between 1787 and Mozart's death in 1791, the single page
manuscript which features one complete musical piece and an unfinished
draft was unveiled in September by the local library in the city of
Nantes.
The score features a Credo, or setting to music of part of the
Catholic mass, of around 90 seconds, as well as a draft inspired by
another part of the mass, a prayer known as a Kyrie.
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French cellist Daniel Cuiller, head of Baroque band
Stradivaria of Nantes, plays an hitherto unknown music score
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart discovered in municipal
Mediatheque library archives on January 22 in Nantes,
western France. The score, on a sheet of paper of just 10
centimeters, was part of the collection of Pierre-Antoine
Laboucheroe, a 19th-century collector who donated his legacy
to the city of Nantes and was certified by Austrian
researchers last year. AFP |
Performed for journalists in Nantes on Thursday by the French
violinist Daniel Cuiller, the complete piece will be played in public at
a music festival in Nantes on January 29.
"He threw some ideas on to paper, and he was going to make something
out of it but never did. That is my impression. But it is a Mozart
manuscript," Cuiller told local television.
Written on a sheet of paper 16 centimetres by 29 (six by 11 inches),
the sheet of music was part of a collection of autographs donated to the
city in 1873, but was only authenticated as a Mozart work in 2007.
On public display in a chateau in Nantes until February 22, the score
was authenticated by the Mozarteum Foundation, in the composer's
Austrian hometown of Salzburg.
The foundation's head of musicology, Ulrich Leisinger, said the
score, whose value he estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 euros,
confirmed Mozart took a close interest in sacred music in the final
years of his life.
"We can consider, with all due caution, that Mozart was planning to
compose a mass in D minor, of which we have the drafts of two
sequences," he said.
Leisinger also said researchers believe the rest of the second piece
may have ended up in a separate collection.
Born in Salzburg in 1756, Mozart moved in 1781 to Vienna where he
composed his most famous works, up until his death at the age of 35.
NANTES, AFP
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