Newly-found Mozart score to get French performance

A newly-found score by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is to get its first public performance 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 score — which features one complete musical piece and an unfinished draft — was unveiled in September by the municipal library in the city of Nantes.

Written on a sheet of paper 16 centimetres by 29 (six to 11 inches), it was part of a collection of autographs donated to the city in 1873, but was only authenticated as a Mozart work in 2007.

The score features a Credo, or setting to music of the Catholic mass, of about 90 seconds, as well as a draft inspired by a prayer known as a Kyrie.

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 complete piece will be played in public at a music festival in Nantes next week.

He said study of the score — whose value he estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 euros — confirmed that 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.

NANTES, France, AFP