Nannerl Notenbuch

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nannerl Notenbuch takes its name from Maria Anna Mozart, the daughter Leopold Mozart nicknamed Nannerl. Leopold filled a book of blank music paper with short pieces to teach her keyboard playing. The project stretched across several years of her childhood. His young son Wolfgang used the very same book, and it is inside these pages that his earliest compositions survive in written form. Some of the original pages have since gone missing from the notebook, scattered into libraries and private hands on different continents. Others remain, filled with the mixed handwriting of several different people. Why did pages get removed from a child's music book? What can the handwriting still tell us about how a father raised a young composer?

• 2. A Gift For Nannerl

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  Forty-eight blank pages, each ruled with eight staves, made up the notebook Leopold presented to Nannerl on the 26th of July 1759, marking her eighth name day. He inscribed the cover with the French words Pour le clavecin, meaning for the harpsichord. Some accounts place the true occasion a few days later instead, on the 30th or the 31st of July, which was her actual eighth birthday. Either way, the pages soon filled with beginner-level material. Countless minuets by unnamed composers appear, alongside original pieces by Leopold and a smaller set of works borrowed from elsewhere. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach contributes an Arietta con Variazioni. The Austrian composer Georg Christoph Wagenseil is credited with a Scherzo in C. Further pieces come from J. N. Tischer and from a composer named Agrell. Technical exercises sit alongside the music, including a table of intervals and figured basses meant to be modulated through different keys. Two or three anonymous copyists from Salzburg helped Leopold fill the book over roughly four years. Wolfgang himself is thought to have written out four of the pieces by hand. Curiously, Nannerl, the daughter the notebook was made for, never inscribed a single page herself. Twelve of these pages would later be removed from the book entirely.

• 3. The Missing Pages

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  Alan Tyson eventually traced eight of the removed pages to collections around the world, though four are considered lost entirely. Two turned up in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and one in the Museum Carolino Augusteum in Salzburg. Two more surfaced in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, and one in the Leipzig University Library. A further page survives only as a facsimile of its opening measures, part of the fragment K. 5b. The rest of that same piece exists on a single leaf, now held in a private collection. Their contents have been reconstructed only tentatively, drawing on Nannerl's own letters and on Georg Nissen's biography of her brother. Once complete, scholars believe the notebook held sixty-four pieces in total, counting unfinished sketches and exercises alongside finished works. Fifty-two of those pieces can still be read directly from the book's surviving pages. Working out exactly whose hand filled each of those pages became a separate research problem on its own.

• 4. Five Hands, One Notebook

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  Wolfgang Plath, writing in 1982, identified five separate scribes at work in the notebook through close study of the handwriting itself. Leopold and Wolfgang each wrote in their own hand. Three further, unnamed Salzburg copyists left pages behind too, now labeled Anonymous I, Anonymous II, and Anonymous III. Two pieces, numbered 58 and 61, survive only through Nissen's material, since the original pages that held them are among the four still lost. Plath judged that Leopold most likely copied both of those pieces himself. Leopold's own hand accounts for more than half of everything written in the Notenbuch. One of those Leopold-copied pieces, No. 48 further along in the book, would turn out to double as one of Wolfgang's own compositions.

• 5. Teaching By Example

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  Piece number 48 in the notebook arranges the third movement of Leopold's Serenade in D. That same trio reappears note for note as Menuet II in Wolfgang's own Sonata, K. 6, direct proof that father and son worked from shared material. The notebook's table of intervals shows that Leopold taught music theory to his children from their very first lessons. He seems to have taught composition the same way, from the very start. His method used a given bass line, a melody to be varied, a melody to be continued, and a fixed structural model. Wolfgang's earliest compositions were first written down in his father's hand, not his own. Only afterward did Leopold add his gentle suggestions for changes. The very first of those compositions, a ten-measure Andante in C, opens the story of Wolfgang as a composer in his own right.

• 6. Wolfgang's First Notes

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  Wolfgang Mozart's first composition, an Andante in C, K. 1a, runs to just ten measures. It was written for the harpsichord and stays in the key of C throughout. The piece opens with a short phrase lasting a single bar, which is then repeated. A second, modified version of that phrase receives the same treatment. The time signature shifts partway through, and the following four measures revert to a distinctly Baroque style. It closes with a simple authentic cadence.

  The Allegro in C, K. 1b, is only slightly longer, at twelve measures. Also written for the harpsichord in C major, its fast tempo makes it far livelier than K. 1a. Unlike that first piece, K. 1b does not rely on repeated phrases. It opens with an ascending scale in the right hand, climbing from the dominant note G to the mediant note E. The left hand adds counterpoint on the off beats while the right hand climbs. After reaching its peak, the right hand descends through quarter notes and eighth notes over a simple bass line. The final cadence lands unusually early, between the eighth and ninth measures. In the last four measures, a full quarter of the piece, Mozart simply rings changes on a plain C major triad.

  The Allegro in F, K. 1c, runs to twenty-four measures counting its repeats. Wolfgang composed it on the 11th of December 1761 in Salzburg. Written for the harpsichord, it stands as Mozart's earliest surviving piece in the key of F major. Like K. 1b, it moves at a fast tempo, and it follows a rounded binary form, with each of its two four-bar sections repeated. Writers have described its simple, classical style as resembling a 'jolly south German folkdance.'

  The Minuet in F, K. 1d, lasts around a minute, built in extended binary form. Its first section runs eight measures, its second twelve, both marked with repeat signs. Leopold notated the piece himself, since Wolfgang was only five years old when he composed it. It stands as Mozart's earliest surviving work in minuet form, stately in feeling and set in triple meter. Its clearest influences come from the pieces Wolfgang was studying by Leopold and by Georg Christoph Wagenseil. Several of its phrases open with chords before giving way to broken chords and triplets.

  The Minuet in G, K. 1e, is eighteen measures long. Leopold probably notated it as well, since Wolfgang was only five or six at the time. It shows far less Baroque influence than K. 1d. Its phrases repeat in a fixed pattern. Every two bars announce themselves with a descending fifth, followed by four chords, and a tune is built within that frame. Each phrase runs eight bars, and the whole piece falls into three sections in two-part harmony, an opening, a contrasting trio, and a reprise.

  The Minuet in C, K. 1f, follows the same short length and structure as K. 1e. Leopold again likely notated it, while Wolfgang was five or six. It shares the same descending-fifth phrasing, four-chord answers, eight-bar phrases, and three-part form. In Köchel's first catalogue of Mozart's works, this minuet was listed together with K. 1e under the single number K. 1.

  The Minuet in F, K. 2, was entered in Salzburg in January 1762. It grows from a single one-bar motif, expanded into an eight-bar exposition that repeats, then modulated into a new key for another eight bars before repeating again.

  The Allegro in B-flat, K. 3, a brief but lively piece, was composed in Salzburg on the 4th of March 1762. Wolfgang was six years old, and Leopold most likely notated it for him.

  The Minuet in F, K. 4, followed soon after, composed in Salzburg on the 11th of May 1762.

  The Minuet in F known as the Triolen-Menuett, K. 5, built around running triplets, was composed in Salzburg on the 5th of July 1762. It is the last minuet Leopold entered into the notebook.

  The Klavierstück in C, K. 5a, runs roughly twice as long as the notebook's other entries. It holds a particular distinction: it is the first piece in the book inscribed in Wolfgang's own hand rather than his father's. It was composed in Salzburg sometime in 1764, though the exact date was never recorded.

  The Andante in B-flat, K. 5b, is the final piece preserved in the Nannerl Notenbuch, and it survives only as a fragment. Leopold notated this one too, composed in Salzburg around 1764. It runs sixty-one measures, counting its repeats.

  Not every entry copied into Leopold's book by his own hand was actually Wolfgang's work.

• 7. An Unfinished Sketch

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  Entry 51 among the notebook's contents, a Konzertsatz in G, was not written by Wolfgang at all. The musicologist Cliff Eisen has described it as 'a sketch or a draft of a keyboard concerto movement, although it cannot be performed as such.' It remained unfinished inside Leopold's book of lessons until the pianist Robert Levin completed a performable version. Levin's completed score was released with the Academy of Ancient Music, on the tenth volume of the Complete Mozart Piano Concertos, in 2023.