New Köchel catalogue lists 95 pieces of unheard Mozart
NewsThe latest update to the catalogue of Mozart’s works, published yesterday after 18 years in the making, is 1,392 pages long and weighs 3kg.
It contains 95 new listings, among them a 12-minute string trio and various piano pieces written by the boy for his sister.
The massive project is accessible online here.
hmmm, why publish when it’s online? plus, there are bound to be errors and updates…
anyway, the site presents complete recordings, but absolutely nothing to identify the musicians… how thoughtless if not disrespectful
The so-called new ‘string trio’ is a seven-movement work lasting 12 minutes or so dating from Mozart’s childhood. Before its discovery Mozart’s original works for string trio comprised two fragments and what is probably the finest work ever written for string trio – the Divertimento in E flat, K563. Then there’s a set of Bach Preludes and Fugues arranged by Mozart for string trio. I doubt that this new work, written in his childhood, will be of any lasting interest. It would seem that all these 95 ‘new works’ are also snippets of interest only to diehard Mozart completists.
The chances are just about zero that any hitherto unknown work of the calibre of the last three symphonies, the Requiem and C minor Mass, ‘Don Giovanni’, fhe G minor String Quintet or the Clarinet Quintet and Concerto (to name only a handful – please feel free to enlarge the list) will ever see the light of day.
Let’s be thankful for the hundreds of divine masterpieces by Mozart that have come down to us to enrich our souls. Es ist genug!
While I agree with Herbie G. that it is too much to hope for that a newly discovered or newly attributed Mozart work would rank with his greatest masterworks, there is always the chance that something might still turn up that is at least worthy of being compared to popular works by Mozart which are in the standard repertoire and are not mere juvenile efforts of curiosity value. It is purely a matter of opinion just when standard repertoire Mozart begins, but good candidates would be the 1772 string Divertimenti K 136-138.
I have read speculations about there being more Mozart bassoon concertos than the one we have, maybe as many as four more concertos.
Some correspondence from Leopold Mozart provides tantalizing hints of a missing concerto for violin, written after the five concertos we all know. There is also some speculating that the so-called Violin Concerto No. 7 is an effort by others to modernize a genuine but lost concerto by Mozart, perhaps that same putative missing concerto Leopold seems to refer to, the MS of which is deemed lost but might well exist somewhere. I think there would be enormous, justified excitement if we suddenly had a definitive and authentic version of Concerto No. 7. It would surely not equal the late masterworks but what if it equaled the Violin Concertos Nos. 3 to 5?
There are also similar speculations that the so-called Violin Concerto No. 6 might have fragments within it of a lost Mozart Concerto, although more and more one sees the work being totally attributed to Johann Friedrich Eck versus the earlier theory that Eck was the ‘re-writer’ (whose ‘improvements’ get little respect). One thing we DO know about the era from Chappell White’s book on classical era violin concertos is that many great virtuosos felt free to appropriate and rewrite the concertos written by others — living composers included. I am sure Mozart felt he was improving the music when he tinkered with the orchestration of Viotti’s Violin Concerto No 16.
Here’s another link, with more information about the New Köchel. Most important, it acknowledges the many years of work of Neal Zaslaw, professor emeritus at Cornell University, as editor of the new edition: https://mozarteum.at/static/30eef4c1b7d2e5a05fe9c5e913a76e83/ISM_Koechel_new_press-release.pdf
All lovers of Mozart’s music owe Neal thanks and congratulations.
Seconded, John. Also (I worked with him in the 1980s), Neal is a thoroughly nice guy.
Their database supports all kinds of keyword searches. One can look up any work, see their score, critical report, listen to a recording and lots more. A fabulous example of what musicology and technology can do together.
Yes, musicology has a lot to offer. Sadly, some blogs focus only on the worst, generalize, and mislead.
Are you whingeing again? Time to leave this site.
How did Mr. Köchel manage to forever hitch his name to Mozart’s?
It’s absolute marketing genius, for basically a guy making a chronological list, to attach his name to a real genius for eternity.
Köchel didn’t discover the works, he didn’t edit the works, he didn’t come up with a unique classification system, he literally just listed things.
Today, the job is called “data entry.”
Let me catalogue the works of Albert Einstein…
Brilliant marketing indeed, but more like data vetting.
Go ahead and catalog them, I dare!!Have you ever even SEEN or held one of these catalogs in your hands? The amount of research, work and care that goes into work like this is absolutely staggering. You could only be American to have such an ignorant, anti-intellectual, dismissive and just plain DUMB opinion. You’re the type of person who says nobody should be vaccinated against polio because someone’s mother’s daughter’s cousins step-father said they knew someone whose kid had a bad reaction. Fool !!
Chet’s message is indeed foolish, but your anti-americanism is just as dumb. There are idiots wolrdwide.
Pity about the odious ad hominem attack. But what you say in the first three sentences is true. Even if Koechel’s catalogue were just a chronological listing, it would have been an incredible feat. But each movement of each work work has a thematic entry for identification and there’s a full account of its provenance. My edition, published in 1965, has 1,025 pages.
Koechel never sought fame – quite the contrary. Virtually nobody knows about his life and few know what a K number is, other than a chronological signifier. The same goes for all those other cataloguers such as Deutsch, Wotquenne, Gerard, Schmieder, Longo and Chrysander.
FYI, the new Köchel catalog project was led by a great US-American, the eminent musicologist Neil Zaslaw, now Professor emeritus at Cornell University.
Also, I have personally spoken with Europeans who believe in anti-vax mythology and are duly unvaccinated.
I wish I had one Euro for every mistake in this book.
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