Experts to check potential Mozart works
WARSAW, Poland (AP) - May 27, 2008 The team is focused on nine scores, though the musicologists
will review 2,000 from the Jasna Gora monastery in Czestochowa,
southern Poland.
"The scores could be compilations from various Mozart works, or
compositions by other authors just signed in his name, or - in the
luckiest case for us - they could be unknown authentic Mozart,"
Remigiusz Pospiech, head of the research team, told The Associated
Press.
"In that case we could talk of a sensation."
But Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the International
Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, said it was "highly
unlikely" that new works by Mozart would be discovered.
"Mozart kept a catalog of all his works from 1784 on,"
Leisinger told the AP in a telephone interview. "This catalog does
not contain any major work we are missing."
Pospiech and more than a dozen young musicologists from across
Poland have been searching through the archives for rare music that
could be performed at the monastery's annual music festival and
recorded.
The copied scores in Jasna Gora's archives were made for the
monastery's musical ensemble, active between the late 16th and
early 20th centuries. At issue in the search is whether monastery
musicians copied Mozart works that have since gone missing.
Pospiech, a musicologist from the University of Opole in
southern Poland, said he was skeptical about the origins of the
Mozart-attributed scores, including a soprano aria, that are not
listed in the register of the composer's work, the so-called
Koechel Catalog.
A recent performance of that aria at the monastery, however,
spurred him into seeking to confirm its authenticity.
So far the team has declared four of the 20 scores carrying
Mozart's name to be misattributions. Seven others are copies of
well-known Mozart works, including the Requiem. That leaves nine
for further research.