Mozart's A major piano sonata K331: the manuscript is discovered!
A chance finding in Budapest has brought a fascinating Mozart manuscript to light. But why can’t we look at it properly?
News has just come to light of a major Mozart discovery, of a priceless manuscript that had lain in the musty depths of Budapest’s National Szechenyi Library for who knows how many decades, only to be rediscovered by a Haydn scholar making one of the most fortuitous Mozartian tangents of all time.
Instead of a fragment of a letter, a half-forgotten dance, or a torn-off corner of a scrawled sketch, what musicologist Balazs Mikusi found was the substantive part of one of Mozart’s most famous instrumental pieces,the A major piano sonata K331, composed in 1783, whose “Turkish March” finale is one of Wolfgang’s most instantly recognisable tunes, and whose opening movement, a set of brilliantly beguiling variations on one of the most satisfyingly simple melodies he ever composed, is a staple of piano lessons the world over. The final page of the original manuscript has long been known to Mozart scholars, and is part of the legacy in Mozart’s hometown, Salzburg, but no original manuscript of the rest of the piece had ever been seen in modern times.
Until now: Mikusi can’t say how or when these pages ended up in Hungary, and what they reveal are tantalising if subtle differences from the published editions of the sonata: phrasing, dynamics, and even occasionally the notes themselves, as Zoltan Kocsis’s performance on Friday night at the Szechenyi Library revealed. Somewhat frustratingly, the library has only released teasing images of the manuscript rather than the whole thing, which will be available in the future as a no-doubt gorgeous but expensive facsimile edition. So a plea to the Szechenyi Library: given how much original Mozart there is out there online, get the pages of the K331 up there too: pianists of the world need to see what Mozart actually wrote!
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