A posthumous 1819 portrait of Mozart by Barbara Krafft.A posthumous 1819 portrait of Mozart by Barbara Krafft.

Flipping through a dusty folder of unidentified music scores in Budapest’s national library, Hungarian scholar Balazs Mikusi’s heart skipped a beat when he came across four pages of the score of a famous Mozart sonata – written by the composer himself.

Mikusi, head of the Hungarian National Szechenyi Library’s music collection, said about the moment he realised what he had stumbled on: “I of course remember the heartbeat. You are turning the pages of hundreds of sources which are obviously written by copiers, not the composer. And suddenly you see something that is a composer’s handwriting – and it even looks similar.

“I said ‘This looks like Mozart’, and very soon I realised this must be Mozart.”

Mikusi quickly cross-checked his finding with Mozart experts, and they confirmed his discovery. The four pages were the original score of the Piano Sonata in A Major, K.331, one of the composer’s best-known sonatas.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the sonata around 1783 and like most of his works, it was also copied down. This original score was believed to have been lost. Only one page is preserved in Salzburg.

On Sunday, Mikusi will present his finding in Salzburg to the Mozart scholar community.

He said many Mozart autographs even turn up at auctions, but the world has long known about those.

“What makes it very interesting is that it’s new. Nobody has ever seen this or if not ever, in the past 200 years,” he said.

“Everybody is intrigued, all the pianists, even average music lovers and, of course, Mozart scholars, of what is actually on this page, how should we reinterpret this sonata in the light of this discovery,” Mikusi said.

It remains a mystery how the score ended up in the collection of the Szechenyi library.

Mikusi said for Mozart scholars the most interesting thing will be to look at the differences between the original score and the copies that would provide plenty of debate worldwide.

“In the menuetto there are a couple of passages that have been much discussed, and many people started to correct the first edition, saying that Mozart’s autograph could not possibly have said that. And now we have the autograph and it actually confirms the first edition,” he said.

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