Eine kleine Nachtmusik

Karl Vötterle was an enthusiastic collector of autographs. For example, he owned the original autograph manuscript of Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik”. He sold this after the war for 50,000 Deutschmarks and with these proceeds he rebuilt the destroyed publishing house building.

The afterword to the facsimile edition of 1955 contains the following text:

“The autograph manuscript of ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik’ was rediscovered by me (Manfred Gorke) in 1943 after having been in private hands for about 100 years. It is currently held in the Bärenreiter library in Kassel.”

After the sale, the whereabouts of the autograph manuscript were initially unable to be traced. According to a report in the newspaper Die Welt of 6 May 2006, the manuscript is now in a collection in Basel. In preparing the “New Mozart Edition”, high quality glossy black-and-white photographs were used rather than the original manuscript. These photographs are now kept at the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg.