New Music from Amadeus

Recently Discovered Portrait

Two newly discovered pieces of music written by a young Mozart are played for the first time in 250 years, in the composer's home city of Salzburg. Austrian musician, Florian Birsak, tackled the pieces - not for the faint hearted.

With its polished parquet floor, the Tanzmeistersaal in the Mozart Residence Museum was full. After all, it is not every day you get to go to a premiere of pieces by Mozart - played on his own piano and in his own house.

Posthumous discoveries of works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are rare but not unknown. And the short two pieces unveiled in Salzburg appear to be a "missing link" in the young composer's development, according to Dr Ulrich Leisinger, from the International Mozarteum Foundation. The first piece to be performed was the Concerto in G molto allegro - probably the first movement of a harpsichord concerto written in 1763 or 1764, when the composer was around eight years old.

Researchers at the Mozarteum believe it forms an important link between the miniatures Mozart wrote as a very young child and the larger instrumental pieces he went on to compose later.
Harvard professor, Robert Levin, says: "What the composer expects of the pianist in racing passagework, crossed hands and wild leaps is more than a bit crazy.
"I consider it quite credible that the movement was composed by the young Mozart who wished to show in it, everything he could do."

There are anecdotes which suggest that Mozart began to compose concertos long before his "first" official piano concerto, in 1773. The Salzburg court trumpeter and close friend of the Mozart family, Johann Andreas Schachtner, described being shown an inkblot-stained score of a part of a concerto written by the young Mozart. Mozart's father, Leopold, had first dismissed the piece - but then looked at it a little more closely.
"Look here Mr Schachtner," he said. "See how everything is correct and regularly set - it is only useless because it is too difficult for anyone to play, too technically demanding."

The young Wolfgang was not abashed. "That's why it is a concerto," he said. "You have to practice a long time before you can play the notes. Here's how to do it."

The second piece, the Prelude in G major, is also technically demanding, but described by researchers as slightly more "refined".
It was the "crazy" and virtuosic nature of the pieces that helped the researchers at the Mozarteum identify them as being by the young Mozart.

It is thought Mozart's father Leopold transcribed the pieces
The works were part of "Nannerl's Music Book"( Nannerl being Mozart's sister), a collection of music compiled by Leopold Mozart which has resided in the archive of the International Mozarteum Foundation since 1864. They are written in Leopold's handwriting - but Dr Leisinger believes he transcribed pieces his son played on the piano.

"The piece does contain real technical mistakes and clumsy moments that an old hand like Leopold Mozart would never have made." Florian Birsak played both pieces on Mozart's fortepiano - and then a short orchestral version of the concerto was performed.
There will be another performance of the pieces during Mozart Week 2010 in Salzburg.

Mozart, born in Salzburg in 1756, began composing at the age of five and went on to produce some of the most famous concertos, symphonies and operas of his time, until his death in 1791.
The latest scores are not the only ones to have resurfaced in recent years.
Last September, a library in Nantes, in western France, unveiled a hitherto unknown music score by Mozart that had lain in its archive undiscovered for over a century. It was authenticated by the Mozarteum.
In 2006, a year filled with celebrations for the 250th anniversary of Austria's favourite son, another piano score extremely likely to be the work of young Wolfgang Amadeus was discovered in Salzburg.
In May last year, experts also identified three mystery musical scores discovered at Poland's historic Jasna Gora Roman Catholic monastery in southern Poland, as possible Mozart creations.

I listened to the music most recently discovered with awe and found it a little eerie to belistening to a new piece by Amadeus, 218 years after his death.

Gallery discovers Mozart portrait:

The portrait's subject was previously unknown . Art experts in Germany say a painting in a Berlin art gallery is probably the last portrait painted of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The picture was painted by the German artist Johann Georg Edlinger in 1790, a year before Mozart's death.
The picture was identified as a Mozart portrait when an expert on the composer used computer analysis to compare it with another painted 13 years earlier.
It had been purchased from a Munich art dealer, as a portrait of an unknown subject.
The senior custodian of the art gallery, Dr Rainer Michaelis, recently commissioned extensive computer analysis of the painting and asked Mozart expert Wolfgang Seiller to investigate.
"Mr Seiller noticed there were strong similarities between the subject of the portrait and Mozart," he told Berlin's BZ newspaper.
It is thought the portrait was painted during Mozart's last stay in Munich in 1790. He died of a mysterious illness in 1791 (thought to be rheumatic fever).