A previously unknown piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been uncovered at a library in Germany. Unearthed from a library in Leipzig, Germany, the 260-year-old string trio composition was discovered by researchers at the city’s music library while compiling the latest edition of the Köchel catalogue. The Köchel catalog is the definitive archive of Mozart’s musical works, a comprehensive and chronological collection of everything Mozart ever composed. It was created by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel back in 1862 and it has been updated and revised several times since.
The just-discovered Mozart piece is being referred to as “Ganz kleine Nachtmusik,” which translates to: “Very little night music” in English. The piece dates to the mid to late 1760s and consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio lasting about 12 minutes, the Leipzig municipal libraries said in a statement.
The Köchel catalogue describes the piece 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”, according to the municipal libraries.
The sheet music itself was not scribed by Mozart, the composer of such famous works as The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, and Requiem. The recently uncovered manuscript is a copy, written around 1780, that the copyist attributed to a “Wolfgang Mozart.” The lack of Mozart’s middle name in the copyist’s signature suggests that Mozart wrote the piece before 1769, when he started to include the middle of his moniker, according to a Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg release.
It is a significant discovery not just because it’s a rediscovered work from one of the greatest musicians who ever lived but because it’s one of the many pieces of chamber music Mozart composed that was thought to have been lost. The manuscript is not an original, but rather a copy made sometime around 1780.
Born in 1756, Mozart was a child prodigy and began composing at a very early age under his father’s guidance.
“Ganz kleine Nachtmusik” got its first public performance by a string trio at the unveiling of the new Köchel catalogue in Mozart’s birthplace in the Austrian city of Salzburg on Thursday, September 19. 2024. It will make its German premiere at the Leipzig Opera sometime soon.
“Mozart dropped a new single,” commented one viewer on YouTube. Watch it being played below.
