New Mozart single just dropped

Hot news in the world of 18th century classical chamber music today, as French news agency Agence France-Presse reports that a new single has just dropped from the Vienna wunderkind himself, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (Who was the Mozart outside the jungle, for those of you keeping track at home.) Unearthed from a library in Leipzig, Germany, the 260-year-old string trio composition got its first public performance in Mozart’s birthplace of Salzburg on Thursday night.

Tragically, no video of the performance of “Ganz kleine nachtmusik” (“Very little night music”) appears to have made its way online; similarly, it doesn’t look like any reviewers were on hand in Salzburg to give the piece a letter grade or star ranking or any other big helpful number so that we could know if it was up to snuff. (The title is absolutely begging for comparisons to Mozart’s 1787 Song Of The Summer “Eine kleine nachtmusik,” a certified banger you might also know as “The one that goes ‘Duh! Duh-duh! Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh!'”) The new song—whose existence was found by archivists working on the Köchel catalogue, the master list of Mozart’s work—was reportedly written when the composer was still a teenager, but he was a child prodigy, so it’s possible the 12-minute piece still slaps. We’ll hopefully know more when the piece gets its German debut at the Leipzig Opera on Saturday; we can’t wait to watch a slightly-out-of-focus video of the performance that’s 80 percent other people holding up their cellphones, by volume.

A number of undiscovered Mozart pieces have been unearthed since his death in 1791, although relatively few of them have achieved any really serious radio play. Mozart wrote several hundred compositions over the course of his long life, and published only a very small percentage of them, so the actual content of his discography remains a matter of both heated interest and debate among musical scholars.

[via Pitchfork]