Ganz kleine Nachtmusik

A previously unknown work by Mozart was discovered in a library at Leipzig last month. Within a couple of weeks, multiple high quality recordings were available on YouTube. Here’s one I enjoyed:

A couple of decades or so ago the news of such a find might still have reached me within a few days, but I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to access a recording in India till months later - if at all.

A somewhat related episode from that time comes to mind.

I was in my twenties and living in Bangalore. I had just begun to recognise my love for reading and western classical music. I remember having particularly enjoyed Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music. This being a book about members of a string quartet1, was full of references to Western Classical music. At one point in the book, the protagonist struggles to locate the recording of an obscure work by Beethoven. Apparently, there weren’t any easy to find recordings of Beethoven’s Op. 1042 - neither in the book nor in real life. Fortunately for me, due to many requests by other readers of the book, Decca had already issued a 2 CD set with a compilation of all the pieces from the book in 2000 - including the elusive Op. 104.

Cover of the CD companion to An Equal MusicCover of the CD companion to An Equal Music

For all the toil it took to obtain the recording, I had mostly forgotten about it. I am not sure where I bought the CD. A search of my Amazon order history from those years turned up nothing. Amazon wasn’t in India then but I would routinely get things3 shipped to friends living in the US and pick them up whenever I’d visit them. So the CD might have come from a physical shop. Either one of the many CD/DVD shops at Schiphol4 I used to visit during those long layovers on the way to the US from India or the shop on Church Street in Bangalore that specialised in Jazz and Classical recordings. I no longer have the CD with me. I gave it away (like all my other CDs) when we left Bangalore. 1-04 III. Menuetto_ Quasi allegro [String Quintet in C Minor, Op. 104].mp3 dated 06 Feb 2011, is now playing in the background as I write this post.

I don’t think I particularly enjoyed the work or even listened to it more than a couple of times. I did use to enjoy the piano trio the work is derived from. It had certainly been novel to listen to it rearranged for a completely different ensemble. I was also going through a Beethoven phase in my life. I was compiling a playlist of all his works one opus at a time. In 2010, I even registered beethovenfans.com with the intent of featuring my favourite recordings of each opus. Both pursuits remain unfinished.

These days you can just stream the entire CD on Spotify and I am sure on any other streaming music service of your choice. Freeing music distribution from the constraints of physical media might have been one of the best things that the internet did.


  1. I only have a vague recollection of it after all these years. I just reserved a copy at the library so I can read it again.↩︎

  2. A string quintet rearrangement of Op. 1 No. 3 piano trio↩︎

  3. Books, CDs, and at one point blank mini discs during my brush with that format.↩︎

  4. Funny that this is my local airport now.↩︎


Date
October 26, 2024