Mozart manuscript cut in half by widow restored to unity

A Mozart manuscript, torn up by the composer's widow
Sound bits ... the torn page of manuscript by the teenage Mozart which the British Library has now brought back together.
A manuscript in the fleet, restless hand of the teenage Mozart, which was cut in two and sold off separately by his financially embarrassed widow after his death, has been brought back together by the British Library. The find comes just short of the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth on January 27.

The single sheet of music was produced by Mozart when he was 17. At the time he was visiting Vienna to be touted by his father, Leopold, for a job as a court musician - unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

One one side of the manuscript are two piano cadenzas (highly virtuosic passages to be performed by a concerto soloist unaccompanied by the orchestra), and on the other a minuet for string quartet.

But in 1835, 44 years after her husband's death, Constanze carefully cut up the manuscript so that the two cadenzas ended up on separate sheets - bar one note that she lopped off the upper piece by mistake. She then sent them off to two separate people in return for favours or, potentially, cash.

"She was quite keen to realise her assets, it's fair to say," said Rupert Ridgewell, the British Library's curator of music collections.

"This was at a time when Mozart was quite popular and his fame was spreading. Anything to do with him had a value. So she had a habit of cutting things up to maximise the profit."

The upper half she sent to a Darmstadt musician called Julius Leidke. The other piece went to a local government official in Bavaria, called Sattler.

Both halves remained in different private collections in continental Europe, until in the 1950s the lower half was bequeathed to the British Library. The upper half has just been acquired.

The minuet comes from the period when Mozart was transforming himself from a pianistic child prodigy into a serious composer, and is associated with his second group of six string quartets, K168-73, though it was eventually discarded in the final version of the set.

The cadenzas are slightly different: one is for a concerto by a different composer, the now virtually forgotten Ignaz von Beecke. The second was for a concerto Mozart had written six years earlier, aged 11 - the "Pastiche" concerto, assembled from other composers' works.