Mozart and friends In The News
Officials at The Musikverein, one of Europes most prestigious concert venues, are investigating whether they have discovered a previously unknown score by Mozart Using high-tech equipment and archival research, experts from around the globe are examining the manuscripts to determine if they are authentic or not. Viennas Society of Musical Friends Archive Director Otto Biba said, some things are for it and some against it. Experts hope to have their answer by next year, when Austria celebrates the 250th anniversary of Mozarts birth with concerts and festivities of all kinds.
"Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro," Rene Jacobs, conductor; Patrizia Ciofi, Veronique Gens, Simon Keenlyside, Angelika Kirchschlager and Lorenzo Regazzo; Martin Sauer, producer (Various Artists; Concerto Koln).
Nov. 5, 2004 Remains of the family of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) were exhumed last week as part of a project to correctly identify a skull that might belong to the Austrian composer.
Mystery still surrounds the remains of Mozart because he was buried at St. Marx cemetery, just outside of Vienna, in a grave that was reused 10 years after the famous Austrian was laid to rest, according to a press release issued by the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, where the skull now is kept.
If scientists do identify the skull as having belonged to Mozart, genetic tests in future might reveal more information about what physical traits and health the composer had during his lifetime.
So far, nine skulls and numerous, as-of-yet unidentified bones have been exhumed from the Mozart family vault at St. Sebastian cemetery in Salzburg. According to Christian Reiter, a professor at the Vienna Institute of Forensic Medicine and the archaeologist who is in charge of the project, the bones probably include the remains of Mozart's wife, Constanze, his father, Leopold, and his niece, Jeanette.
Since historical accounts reveal that Jeanette died at the age of 16, Reiter and his team are confident that one set of remains, which clearly belong to a young female because of their size and anatomy, are those of Jeannette. She was the daughter of Mozart's sister, Maria Anna Mozart, who went by the nickname Nannerl.
Nannerl was a talented composer in her own right. She was touted as the musical equivalent of her brother when the two performed together as children. Her brother's achievements later overshadowed those of Nannerl, but she continued with her music and became a Salzburg piano teacher.
Reiter and his team now are working to extract DNA from all of the remains, but are focusing on those likely from Jeannette. Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed maternally, leaves a genetic marker that scientists can use to trace family histories. If the mitochondrial DNA from the young female matches DNA extracted from the Mozarteum skull, then the foundation's skull can be attributed to the famous composer.
Mirjam Nellmann, director of media relations at the International Morzarteum Foundation, told Discovery News that "the project is not our initiative," and desired to comment no further on the project, which is funded by the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation.
The foundation, however, is cooperating with the scientists. In addition to providing access to the skull, they have given the scientists samples of hair that might have been Mozart's.
Although the composer died before his 36th birthday, he left a musical legacy of over 600 works, including operas, symphonies, chamber pieces and church music. He was a child prodigy who composed many works before the age of 14.
His popularity waned toward the end of his life, when he was forced to make his living by selling his compositions and teaching music. He died in poverty, and had a modest burial.
Rachel Cowgill, senior lecturer at the University of Leeds School of Music and an expert on Mozart, explained why his plot was dug up ten years after his death.
"The site was reused because in Vienna in the 1790's, burial plots were leased for ten years," she told Discovery News. "There was nothing unusual about the way Mozart was buried for a Viennese of his class and time."
Gravedigger Joseph Rothmayer claimed to have salvaged the skull from the site in 1801. The skull changed hands numerous times during the 19th century before the Mozarteum foundation obtained it in 1901. Since then, numerous scientists have examined the skull, but results have been mixed. Some experts say the skull matches written descriptions, while others say it was female.
The mystery should be solved after the DNA results are announced in 2006, when celebrations are planned for the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.
Lost Beethoven oboe concerto heard again...
Associated Press
(ROTTERDAM, Netherlands) - Musicologists puzzled over a lost Ludwig van Beethoven concerto for decades, ever since the 1960s discovery of the sketch of a single movement among the composer's papers.
Now, two Dutch Beethoven enthusiasts have pieced together the musical clues, put them into 18th-century orchestral context, and reconstructed the second movement of the only oboe concerto Beethoven ever wrote.
The slow, melodic Largo movement of the Oboe Concerto in F major was performed Saturday night in Rotterdam, and billed as a "world premiere" - even though the full concerto was performed at least once before, 210 years ago.
"Premieres happen all the time. But a Beethoven piece that's never been heard?" said Conrad van Alphen, conductor of the Rotterdam Chamber Orchestra. "To have a Beethoven premiere is really special."
The eight-minute piece was slipped into an evening of concert standards by Mozart and C.P.E. Bach without fanfare, barring a bold-print note on the program announcing the "premiere."
The audience gave the movement warm applause but saved its standing ovations for more familiar pieces on the program.
The recovered concerto is from an early work, and gives little foretaste of the majestic symphonies Beethoven wrote while going deaf. The movement reveals a cautious composer, then a 22-year-old student still influenced by Mozart and his teacher Franz Josef Haydn.
Nonetheless, recovering the movement is significant: Of all the genres of music in Beethoven's prolific career, the oboe concerto was among the few he hardly touched.
Beethoven wrote the concerto in 1792 as an exercise under Haydn, and revised the second movement the next year. It would be several more years before he published his Opus No. 1, announcing himself as a composer.
The only known copy of the oboe concerto vanished from a Vienna publishing house in the 1840s. Its existence was confirmed in 1935 when researchers found an exchange of letters between Haydn and Beethoven's sponsor, in which the Austrian composer seeks a further stipend for his young German pupil.
The sponsor's letter confirmed that the oboe concerto had been performed in Bonn, Germany, although he appeared unimpressed by it.
Next, a Beethoven scholar found the opening notes of the three movements in a Bonn library, and published them in 1964. Another scholar examined bundles of Beethoven's sketches, or drafts, in the British Library, and, working with the clues found in Bonn, could identify the oboe concerto's second movement.
Since then, experts have tried to rebuild the movement, but Jos van der Zanden and Cees Nieuwenhuizen are believed to be the first to do so with full orchestration.
Van der Zanden, a musicologist with Dutch radio and a frequent contributor to the Beethoven Journal, published in San Jose, Calif., worked for more than a year with composer Nieuwenhuizen to reconstruct a "sober 18th-century accompaniment."
The two "had the skeleton, from the first to the last note," but were uncertain which passages were intended for the oboe soloist and which for the orchestra. Scoring the orchestration, they inferred harmonies from the way similar concertos were composed at the time, van der Zanden said.
The sketches also had clues for the full score: a few marks and symbols above the staves indicating chords, cadences, or links to other passages.
"He probably had this lying on his desk when he wrote the score," van der Zanden said, still flushed after hearing it played before an audience for the first time.
Van der Zanden approached several orchestras to perform the movement, but all had full schedules booked years in advance. A friend in Rotterdam suggested the young chamber orchestra, formed in 2000 and led by Van Alphen, a Dutch-South African conductor.
Performing on the oboe was Alexei Ogrintchouk, a Russian-born soloist with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra who, at 24, is roughly the same age as Beethoven was when he scored the concerto.
The oboist said: "It's a big responsibility, but a joyful one."
Mozart relieves Epilepsy Symptoms
(BBC News)--Music, Particularly Mozart, could have a therapeutic effect on epilepsy, say scientists. Short bursts of Mozartīs Sonata K448 have been found to decrease epilepsy attacks. There are now calls for more research to be done to see whether other music has such a positive effect on the brain.
University of London Professor John Jenkins, who has reviewed the international research on music therapy, said it was very probable that work by other musicians could trigger "The Mozart Effect".
Patients who had been exposed to 10 minutes of the music were then tested and found to have improved their spatial skills such as paper cutting and folding.
In other tests, children who were taught a keybord instrument for six months, learning melodies by Mozart and other composers, did better on tests than children who spent six months working with computers.
although other scientists were unable to reproduce these results, Professor Jenkins said they had merit, and the positive effects on epilepsy were particularly encouraging; "There is enough in it to justify further work being done. I thought there was enough...to justify longer term exposure" he said.
"listening to Mozart could just hold some hope in the treatment of epilepsy"
Jenkins said the left side of the brain tends to process rhythm and pitch and the right looks after timbre and melody, and that listening to music would prime the relevant areas of the brain(for epileptics). But he stressed that for the music therapy to be of any real use for epileptics, there would have to be much more research on the "Mozart Effect".
Could "The Other White Meat" Have Killed Mozart?
(Chicago, AP) Forget Rheumatic Fever, Kidney Stones, Heart Disease, Pneumonia, or even poison-- a new theory holds that pork cutlets may have caused the demise of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Under this theory, the composerīs untimely death in 1791 at age 35 may have been the result of trichinosis.
The illness is usually caused by eating undercooked pork, and could explain all of Mozartīs symptoms, which included fever, rash, limb pain, and swelling.
the latest theory comes from Doctor Jan Hirschmann, who offers as evidence a letter Mozart wrote to his wife 44 days before his illness began. In it, Mozart refers to Pork cutlets, and adds "I eat to your health". "If his final illness was indeed trichinosis, whose incubation period is up to 50 days, Mozart may have unwittingly disclosed the precise cause of his death-- those very pork chops," Hirschmann said.
Hirschmannīs 8-page report was based on an examination of medical literature, historical documents, and Mozart Biographies.
Itīs published in the June 11th issue of "Archives of Internal Medicine".
Mozart Manuscript found
(Sue Leeman, AP) A British Academic Believes she has discovered a long-lost Mozart arrangement of Handelīs "Judas Maccabaeus". Rachel Cowgill, an expert on Mozart who teaches at Leeds University, Found the adaptation of Handelīs oratorio at the records office of the local Calderdale council.
"I opened the score and looked at the title page where it quite clearly said, īBy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartī, then I realized it was īJudas Maccabaeusī, she said. Other experts are examining the piece, which is not in Mozartīs own hand. Cowgill is convinced itīs genuine, saying the arrangement techniques match those of Mozartīs adaptation of Handelīs "Messiah".
