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Several times recently I have noted that it is not widely enough known that the Concert Rondo of Mozart, K. 371, is actually sixty measures longer than the old standard editions of the work. The sixty “new” measures of music became known in 1990 on a page that had become separated from the rest of the manuscript score many years ago.
I usually use the Birdalone edition of this work with college students to get the full picture of the work as conceived by Mozart. It is striking that it just happens to work without the 60 bars, but it is better with them.
This edition also has a reconstruction (by James Nicholas) of the matching first movement (K 370b), the manuscript of which the son of Mozart gave away pages of; the combination makes for a “new” two movement concerto similar to Mozart 1. Check both movements out if you are unfamiliar with this new edition.
UPDATE: In addition to the Birdalone version, edited by James Nicholas, the new Schirmer version (1994, edited by Tuckwell) has the same, complete version of the rondo as well (although the older Schirmer version still is in print, so be sure to get the correct one).
The Foreword by James Nicholas to the Birdalone version had a great introduction to this work, as below:
The sporadically orchestrated Ronedau, K. 371, long known to hornists as the Concert Rondo…. had been generally assumed to be complete, comprising 219 bars on sixteen pages of score. However, in 1990, four additional pages (i.e., one “bifolium,” a single sheet of paper, folded in half) containing sixty bars of music were auctioned through Sotheby’s by a private collector, identified as Mozart’s work by Alan Tyson, and reunited with the rest of the manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. This brings the total number of bars to 279, and in fact the missing sixty bars reveals a typically Mozartian sonata-rondo structure, in which the first episode modulates to the dominant and is later recapitulated in the tonic. The gap created by the removal of these four pages appears not to have aroused any suspicions in times past; by odd coincidence, there is a plausible, if not completely convincing, musical transition between bar 26 (the last bar on page 2 of the ms.) and bar 87 (the first bar of what formerly was believed to be page 3).
