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 down by the composer himself.
Mikusi, head of the Hungarian National Szechenyi Library’s music collection, told Reuters TV about the moment he realized 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,” he said a few days after the manuscript was presented to the public.
“I said ‘this looks like Mozart’, and very soon I realized this must be Mozart because I started to read the piece, and it happens to be one of the most famous Mozart sonatas.”
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.
