After 200 years, a lost symphony is performed
The crowd sweltering under a tent on the South Lawn of the White House last week had gathered at a great occasion. On a platform were Conductor Leonard Slatkin and, instruments at the ready, New York's Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. In the audience: the President of the United States. But the real guest of honor was the shade of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose long-lost Symphony in F, K. 19a, was having its American premiere more than two centuries after it was written and several months after it mysteriously surfaced in West Germany. The composer...