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 Flipping through a dusty folder of unidentified music scores
in Budapest's national library, Hungarian scholar Balazs
Mikusi's heart skipped a beat when he came across four pages of
the score of a famous Mozart sonata - written down by the
composer himself.
Mikusi, head of the Hungarian National Szechenyi Library's music
collection, told Reuters TV about the moment he realized what he
had stumbled on.
"I of course remember the heartbeat. You are turning the pages
of hundreds of sources which are obviously written by copiers,
not the composer. And suddenly you see something that is a
composer's handwriting - and it even looks similar," he said a
few days after the manuscript was presented to the public.
"I said 'This looks like Mozart', and very soon I realized this
must be Mozart because I started to read the piece, and it
happens to be one of the most famous Mozart sonatas."
Mikusi quickly cross-checked his finding with Mozart experts,
and they confirmed his discovery. The four pages were the
original score of the Piano Sonata in A Major, K.331, one of the
composer's best-known sonatas.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the sonata around 1783 and like
most of his works, it was also copied down. This original score
was believed to have been lost. Only one page is preserved in
Salzburg.
"There were two people who I trust very much and whom I have
known for more than 10 years, one of them is Ulrich Leisinger,
director of Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, he wrote back very
soon saying yes this must be Mozart's handwriting," Mikusi said.
On Sunday, Mikusi will present his finding in Salzburg to the
Mozart scholar community.
He said many Mozart autographs even turn up at auctions, but the
world has long known about those.
"What makes it very interesting is that it's new. Nobody has
ever seen this or if not ever, in the past 200 years," he said.
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"Everybody is intrigued, all the pianists, even average music
lovers, and of course Mozart scholars, of what is actually on this
page, how should we re-interpret this sonata in the light of this
discovery," Mikusi said.
It remains a mystery how the score ended up in the collection of the
Szechenyi library.
Mikusi said for Mozart scholars the most interesting thing will be
to look at the differences between the original score and the copies
that would provide plenty of debate worldwide.
"In the menuetto there are a couple of passages that have been much
discussed, and many people started to correct the first edition,
saying that Mozart's autograph could not possibly have said that.
And now we have the autograph and it actually confirms the first
edition," he said.
"So I think Mozart scholars will have to re-think what we believe
Mozart could have written down and what not."
"There are actually several differences, but we should recall that
the first edition was probably authorized by Mozart so it is not
always the case that the autograph should over-write the first
edition. One has to think about that, in which case this could be a
printing mistake, or in other cases Mozart might have corrected
something.
"So this is not to say that this autograph is the Bible and now we
have to follow this. This makes the whole situation more complicated
and it is one of the most important sources that we have to consider
from now on."
(Reporting by Krisztina Fenyo and Krisztina Than; Editing by Hugh
Lawson, Larry King)
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