Mozart or no Mozart
It’s still a piece of art
No more this holy fuss
All ears for Casadesus.
No doubt if an undiscovered piece by Mozart suddenly
turned up in the modern world, especially a 10-year-old Mozart, it would cause
great excitement in the community. And it definitely did.
The Concerto pour
la princesse Adélaïde (Adélaïde Concerto) is the nickname of a Violin
Concerto in D Major attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and given the catalog
number K. Anh. 294a in the third edition of the standard Köchel catalogue of
Mozart's works. Unknown until the 20th century, this concerto was later
discovered to be a spurious work by Marius Casadesus.
First published in 1933 in a version for violin and
piano, the concerto was said by Casadesus, the "editor," to have been
arranged from a manuscript by the ten-year-old Mozart, with a title page
containing a dedication to Madame Adélaïde de France, eldest daughter of King
Louis XV. Conveniently enough, this alleged manuscript was never accessible to
later enquirers such as Alfred Einstein and Friedrich Blume, but Casadesus
described it, according to Blume, as "an autograph manuscript in two staves,
of which the upper stave carries the solo part (including 'tuttis'...) and the
lower carries the bass."
In what was surely a nose-tweak at those fooled by this
imposture, Casadesus also reported (according to Blume) that "The upper
stave is notated in D, the lower in E"! Since the violin is not a
transposing instrument, there would have been no obvious technical reason for
the upper staff to be written in a different key from the lower staff,
especially for what sounds more like a short score than a completed score.
In spite of certain doubts, many music scholars believed
in its authenticity, and Yehudi Menuhin made a recording of the concerto.
Despite the lack of provenance, Blume was thoroughly
taken in by the concerto, although Einstein professed himself skeptical. The
latter referred to it as "a piece of mystification a la Kreisler."
(Fritz Kreisler, the famed violinist, had written several pieces in the styles
of composers such as Gaetano Pugnani, Giuseppe Tartini, and Antonio Vivaldi
which he had originally passed off as compositions by these older masters.)
Many others expressed similar doubts, but only in 1977
during a copyright dispute did Casadesus admit his authorship of this alleged
"Mozart" work.
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