Organ Works

Many records attest that, among the one who was the enfant prodige par excellence, there was also the talent of a great organist. Suffice it to say that, at the age of seven, thus in 1763, a precocious Amadeus presented himself thus to the Frankfurt public in the poster announcing his performance: “The child, who is seven years old, … will improvise on the harpsichord or organ, in any key, even the most difficult, as long as the public wishes, in order to prove that he is really as expert on the organ as on the harpsichord, although they are completely different instruments….”
This recording presents two works of occasion, so to speak: those that Amadé dedicated to the all-eighteenth-century “technological marvel” of the Cylinder Organ or Mechanical Organ, the invention of which is attributed to the Italian Giovanni Barbieri, for whom other “spiriti magni” of music, in addition to Mozart himself, also wrote, such as Bach (C. P.E.), Haydn, Haendel, Beethoven; and those that were intended for the Sundays of a group of lovers of “early music” (by which was meant, not infrequently, Bach and Haendel…), who met at Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s. Occasional works, then, but which shed a singular and by no means obvious light on the great Wolfgang’s talent. Two famous transcriptions end the CD: Franz Liszt’s “Ave Verum Corpus” and the famous “Fugue” from the Kyrie of Mozart’s Requiem accomplished by Muzio Clementi.