A lost Mozart masterpiece discovered in German library

Newly discovered serenade by Mozart stuns the classical music world

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Of all the things that could’ve potentially happened in 2024, I strongly doubt anyone had “finding an unknown piece by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” on the list.

Yet, that’s what occurred last week.

The Leipziger Städtische Bibliotheken (Leipzig Municipal Libraries) in Germany announced on Sept. 19 that it had unearthed an unknown piece – lasting just 12 minutes – by the great composer.

The newly discovered piece, Ganz kleine Nachtmusik (“Very Little Night Music”), came from 19th-century German writer/composer Carl Ferdinand Becker’s collection under the title “Serenate ex C.” It appears to have been found entirely by chance.

“The manuscript is a copy or transcription that was made around 1780. It is therefore not by Mozart himself,” the public library noted. “Dark brown ink and medium white handmade paper were used, the parts are bound individually, and the manuscript was not signed. It is assumed that it was written in the mid to late 1760s – Mozart must have just become a teenager. Mozart’s previously unnoticed work is also referred to as the ‘Ganz kleine Nachtmusik’ in the new Köchel catalogue and is listed under the number KV 648. The piece consists of seven miniature movements for string trio, which together last only about 12 minutes.”

As mentioned in a CBS News piece, the Köchel catalogue described it as “preserved in a single source, in which the attribution of the author suggests that the work was written before Mozart’s first trip to Italy.” Ulrich Leisinger of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg also issued a statement about the importance and uniqueness of this discovery. The young Mozart was known “mainly as a composer of piano music, arias and symphonies,” he said, which is quite different from this composition. “Since the inspiration for this apparently came from Mozart’s sister,” Leisinger continued, “it is tempting to imagine that she kept the work as a memento of her brother.”

It’s also important to address the elephant in the room. How do we know for sure this is an original composition by Mozart?

Leisinger’s Sept. 19 interview with ZDFheute provided the best possible explanation for the time being. “The similarity to other Mozart compositions from this period and external features such as the composer’s name on the sheet music suggest that this serenade was written by Mozart,” he told the German TV station. “According to the expert, this cannot be proven with 100 percent certainty. However, everything has been done to rule out the possibility that this piece is stored in some archive under the name of another composer.”

The first modern performance of Ganz kleine Nachtmusik was held on Sept. 19 at the International Mozarteum Foundation. Three musicians from the Musikschule Leipzig “Johann Sebastian Bach,” Vincent Geer, David Geer and Elisabeth Zimmermann, provided the first German performance at the Leipzig Opera on Sept. 21.

As one would expect, this short musical piece is as brilliant as the composer associated with it. Light, playful, jovial and mesmerizing as each note in the stanza is performed. It’s a wonderful addition to the Köchel catalogue and will surely be performed by many musicians and groups in the years to come.

Is this the most important discovery in the history of classical music? Arguably so.

There have been discoveries of unknown or lost work of some great composers. British musicologist Barry Cooper tied 250 bars of music together from a small number of sketches in 1988 to produce the most faithful account of the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. (Artificial Intelligence was controversially used to “finish” it in 2021.) Michael Maul, a scholar at Leipzig’s Bach Archive, found an unknown handwritten aria by Johann Sebastian Bach at Weimar’s Anna Amalia Library in 2005. Antonio Vivaldi’s Il Gran Mogol, a flute concerto that had been lost for 250 years, was re-discovered by musicologist Andrew Woolley in 2010 in the papers of Marquesses of Lothian in Edinburgh’s National Archives of Scotland. An unknown version of Vivaldi’s opera Orlando Furioso, written 13 years before his masterpiece was released, was found in Turin’s Biblioteca Nazionale in 2012. British musicologist Roger Parker unveiled close to 90 unknown pieces by Gaetano Donizetti in 2023.

What about Mozart?

Although he was a prolific composer in his short 35 years of life, there’s always been the suspicion the total number is much higher. Leisinger noted that Mozart’s father, Leopold, composed a list of “many other chamber music compositions” attributed to his young son. Academics were, therefore, aware of the possibility of finding additional Mozart pieces. One recent example is Allegro in D major, a two-minute handwritten piece listed in early 20th-century auction catalogues as a sketch that was re-discovered in 2018.

Nevertheless, the odds of unearthing an unknown piece like Ganz kleine Nachtmusik were extremely low. That’s what makes it a musical discovery of greater importance than virtually all others before it. Who knows? It could end up being the start of even more unidentified and misattributed classical music compositions being shifted into Mozart’s already significant body of work before long.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.

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