Lost Mozart symphony in a carton

Press, 25 June 1983, Page 17

Lost Mozart symphony in a carton

Last year, a 64-year-old Dane was thumbing through cartons in an archive and wiping the dust from his beard when he discovered the handwritten score of a symphony in A minor. It was signed Mozart. Gunnar Thygesen, librarian and once first oboist of the Odense City Orchestra, did not doubt that he was holding the missing “Child Symphony,” probably written in 1764 or 1765. It could have been composed during a visit of the young genius to London. Thygesen was not surprised that the musical sensation was unearthed in the main town on Fyn Island, “Denmark’s garden,” better known as the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75). On the upper right corner of the cover of Mozart’s work he could read “Klubben 1793.” “The Club” attracted the cultural elite of old Odense, welcomed foreign musicians to town, bought their compositions, and later financed the travels of Andersen. Mozart’s score, given the Kochel numbering 16a, was bought two year’s after his death and played in Odense. Yet it is not an original, having been copied by at least two people. It vanished, along with other copies, around 1800. “The Club was disbanded a long time ago,” Thygesen says. “During

the Second World War its papers were hidden in the Town Hall cellar, and given to the city orchestra after the war. "At that time the conductor, Poul Jensen, searched through piles of papers and found an unknown overture of Rossini, later called ‘The Odense Overture’.” The elated Jensen should have looked further, but the cartons were then removed to Fyn’s Community Hall and might have been undiscovered for many more years had Odense not decided to build a new concert house, and Thygesen’s curiosity was aroused. Since then several famous orchestras have offered to play the piece, but the Odense City Orchestra will introduce the A minor symphony to the modern music society, not before the northern autumn. Meanwhile, Odense musicians remain silent about the work, except to say that it is written for 12 instruments and has three movements. Thygesen, however, reveals that it has 331 bars, lasts 14 minutes, and is “fantastic,” if not reaching the quality of Mozart’s masterpieces. He adds that the cartons have since been examined thoroughly — without further discoveries.

From

ROSS BROWN

in Odense