Watch the First Performance of a Mozart Composition That Had Been Lost for Centuries

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.