When I learnt last month that researchers working on the Köchel catalogue—which updates and lists Mozart’s musical oeuvre, the latest edition of which was released on September 19 in Salzburg—had stumbled on to a previously unknown Mozart work, I thought, ‘It must be some bit of juvenilia that only hardcore biker Wolfgangs get all Horn Concerto No. 4 about.’
The manuscript, I had learnt, was a copy made around 1780 of a piece that Mozart had composed in the mid-to-late-1760s. Now, I know young Amadeus was a child prodigy. But by the whiskers of Shah Alam II (who was the Mughal emperor back at that time), what value would a piece of music by a 10-13 yr-old Austrian brat hold in Mozart’s grand canon?
Well, this week, I got to listen to it on Spotify—the piece that’s ‘debuted’ after some 250 years, performed by the Czech Royal Prestanov Orchestra. And by the sword of Tipu Sultan (some four years Amadeus’ senior), to quote the legendary radio presenter John Peel when he first listened to the Ramones, ‘Why hasn’t this happened before?’ Titled ‘Serenade in C’ on the manuscript, the piece comprises 7 small movements for a string trio—two violins and a bass. It’s been now renamed as ‘Ganz Kleine Nachtmusik (‘Very Little Night Music) —obviously to echo Mozart’s most famous ‘serenade,’ ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ that he composed in 1787, four years before his death at 35, ‘ganz’ being smaller than ‘kleine’ (little).
The opening bars of the first movement starts traditionally enough, like dance music of its time—swathing violins, dipping-head cello, marking time, facilitating movement on the dancefloor. Then suddenly in the 17th min, there’s a flurry of violent notes struck on string that could have been that set of guitar attacks brought down like an axe by Jonny Greenwood in Radiohead’s breakout 1992 hit, ‘Creep,’ just before the chorus. But tween/teen Mozart lets things subside. Maybe he had reckoned that his father, who was also his ‘manager’ for his tours, didn’t approve of Figaroing with notes at that age.
The second movement starts swimmingly—until those violin bursts return, booby-trapped as discordant, gleefully playful notes in the middle of music for otherwise polite ‘adult’ company. But it’s the third movement that establishes this genius rascal as a punk rocker in my book.You can clearly hear Mozart ‘literally’ fucking around with the traditional French melody ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, mama’ (Oh! Shall I tell you, Mama’) —which today we’re all familiar with as the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,’ with its words from the 1806 English poem by Jane Taylor. Mozart would go on to play with the tune again in his 1781-82 piano ‘Twelve Variations on ‘Ah vous dirai-je, Maman.’ But here, the boy’s doing what Johnny Rotten did to the British national anthem with the Sex Pistols’ 1977 anti-anthemic anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’. Young Mozart is fun and furious on this stretch. You can almost see him sneer through his powdered proto-Mohawk wig.We have grace, which feels almost ironic after the earlier mini-mayhem. But its charm is genuine, with cello and violins weaving in and out, underlining the kid’s mastery over instrumentation and what instruments can produce if tamed—or let loose. The serenade ends in a tight lilt, with the last movement ‘Eine Kleine Tanzmusik’—‘A Little Dance Music’.
Yes, sure, it’s a minor work of a major musician- —but not ridiculous like ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. It’s more like ‘There’s a Place’ from the same band’s 1963 debut album, Please Please Me. So, please, please give me this 12 min-odd dancepunk blast from the past any day to headbang to, over any torrents of emo punctuated with systolic-diastolic howling that the 44 min-long new Coldplay album, Moon Music, is inflated with. Rock me, Amadeus.