For most musicians, a long-lost song written in their teenage years would be of interest only to serious fans — and even then, probably more for biographical reasons than as a standalone piece of work. But that’s hardly the case for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was composing advanced music at the age of five, and indeed completed the first act of his short life by adolescence. Hence the guaranteed appreciative audience for Serenade in C, a hitherto unknown piece recently discovered in the holdings of Germany’s Leipzig Municipal Libraries and first performed for the public just last week.
“Library researchers were compiling an edition of the Köchel catalog, a comprehensive archive of Mozart’s work, when they stumbled across a mysterious bound manuscript containing a handwritten composition in brown ink,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sonja Anderson.
Composed in the mid-to-late 1760s, Serenade in C “consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio (two violins and a bass).” According to researchers, it “fits stylistically” the work of that period, “when Mozart was between the ages of 10 and 13”; a few years later, he’d outgrown (or transcended) this style of chamber music entirely.
You can see and hear Serenade in C in the video at the top of the post, performed earlier this month, not long after its premiere, on the steps of the Leipzig Opera by Vincent Geer, David Geer, and Elisabeth Zimmermann of the Leipzig School of Music’s youth symphony orchestra. Renamed Ganz kleine Nachtmusik, this “new” Mozart piece has been included in the latest Köchel catalog with the number K. 648. If you listen to it in the context of Mozart’s artistic evolution, you’ll also notice the ways in which it stands out in a period when he wrote mainly arias, symphonies, and piano music. As for the extent to which it prefigures things to come, it’s early enough that we should probably leave that question to the Mozartologists.
via Smithsonian.com
Related content:
Hear the Evolution of Mozart’s Music, Composed from Ages 5 to 35
Newly Discovered Piece by Mozart Performed on His Own Fortepiano
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
