The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, said two newly discovered pieces were probably composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as a young boy, according to media reports Monday.
The results were announced for the first time in public at a news conference in a Mozart residence in Salzburg where the two pieces were performed on the master composer's own fortepiano.
The music consists of 35 measures of a piano prelude and the solo part, 75 measures long, of a complete movement of a keyboard concerto, said Ulrich Leisinger, director of the Mozarteum’s research department, who is credited with the discovery.
Leisinger said that the anonymous works had been composed by Mozart in 1763 or 1764 when he was 7- or 8-years-old.
Both pieces were transcribed in the writing of Mozart's father Leopold, but analysis showed he must have done so from what his prodigy child was playing on a piano, Leisinger told.
He said the young Mozart almost certainly asked his father to put the pieces to paper because he could not yet do musical notation, and later made his own corrections.
If truly by him, they would serve as an important link between his simple earliest compositions and his first major works, Leisinger said.
This is not the first time in recent years that works by Mozart have resurfaced posthumously. Last year a library in Nantes, France, reported finding that a musical score that had been donated by a private collector at the end of the 19th century was a Mozart original rather than a copy as earlier thought.
(Xinhua/Agencies August 4, 2009)
