Emily Chan
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a young teenager, he composed a 12-minute piece of music called Serenade in C.
The long-lost piece was recently discovered in the Leipzig Municipal Libraries in Germany. The libraries are located about 280 miles north of Salzburg, Austria, where Mozart was born in 1756.
According to the Leipzig Municipal Libraries, Mozart most likely wrote the composition in the mid-to-late 1760s.
Library researchers had been putting together the Köchel catalog, a comprehensive archive of Mozart’s work, when they came across a manuscript of a musical composition handwritten in brown ink.
The composition was credited to Wolfgang Mozart, but the handwriting did not belong to him, suggesting that the manuscript was a copy of the original sheet music and was made around 1780.
Serenade in C was made for two violins and a bass. It consists of seven miniature movements.
Based on the composition’s timing and style, Mozart was between the ages of 10 and 13 when he wrote it.
The attribution to Wolfgang Mozart indicated that the piece was from the composer’s youth. Around 1769, he started adding “Amadeo” to his name. By the time he was in his late teens, he was no longer creating pieces with that kind of sound.
Mozart was a child prodigy by the age of five. He toured Europe, performing for royals and other figures of nobility.
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