“For Balazs Mikusi, a young Hungarian musicologist, it was the find of a lifetime,” reports Allan Kozinn in Saturday’s (10/4) New York Times. “Leafing through folders of unidentified manuscripts at the National Szechenyi Library in Budapest recently, he came across four pages of what looked to him like Mozart’s handwriting. As he read through the music, he told Agence France-Presse, he realized that he had stumbled onto Mozart’s own score of the Piano Sonata in A, K.331—one of the best-known Mozart sonatas because of its ‘Rondo alla Turca’ finale. To verify his impression Mr. Mikusi showed a copy of the score to Ulrich Leisinger, the director of the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, and Neal Zaslaw, the editor of the new Köchel catalog of Mozart’s works. Both agreed that the writing was Mozart’s, Mr. Mikusi said .… This version of the sonata, which the pianist Zoltan Kocsis performed at a private concert at the National Szechenyi Library last Friday evening, differs from the standard edition in several details.… Until now only one manuscript page of the sonata has been known: the work’s final page has long been preserved in Salzburg.”
Posted October 8, 2014
