Baby steps

How many minutes till that August 2 announcement from the Mozarteum? I can't wait to hear about those newly authenticated Mozart pieces.

They are supposed to be piano pieces he wrote when he was a kid.

I wonder if they are anything like his famous first minuets. I love those minuets!

It is a thrill in life when you first run across K. 1. The first piece of music in the catalog of Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. The absolute first, in that historic catalog that ends with K. 626, the Requiem.

Then there is K. 2. So lovely in its own little way.

These minuets are so good, is what I cannot get over. They already have that certain something that I am sorry, many other 18th century composers did not have. This is how you know that Mozart wrote them himself and they were not written by his father, Leopold. Leopold did not have that peculiar certain something.

I cannot quite put my finger on it and I do not quite want to. But the music just flows.

I just went wading through YouTube looking for someone good playing these Mozart minuets. Most of the recordings you find are of amateurs with terrible sound quality and apostrophes in the wrong place. They get thousands of views! I cannot figure that out. There are also lots of videos of annoying little "prodigies" playing them. We do not want those.

OK, finally, here is Edwin Fischer playing K. 1. He plays it as if it is made out of glass but the grace shines through.

Here is someone named Cubus playing K. 2. I like the wacky video quality and it is a nice, straightforward performance.

Cubus also does K. 1.

Oh, this is so sweet. Someone made this little video with K. 1 and a grainy home movie her father took of her when she was a little girl. I thought at first it was the Fischer version, the one we just heard. But it is Ingrid Haebler.

Here are harpsichord performances of K. 1 and 2 and three other early Mozart minuets.

If these two "new" pieces are anything like these, I just have one question:

Why did it take them so long to figure out that Mozart wrote them?