The long-lost copy of 1790's The Philosopher's Stone indicates that Mozart—then at the peak of his powers—wrote the music for part of the obscure fairy-tale opera's second act. Buch's revelation made headlines from New York City to Frankfurt. Buch has the goods," an article in The New York Times declared. When it was performed last fall for the first time in nearly two centuries by Boston Baroque, the opera met with good reviews and thunderous applause. (The CD hit stores two weeks ago.) Buch's find "is really quite extraordinary," says Martin Pearlman, Baroque's director. In addition to bearing the master's name (unlike the recitative, apparently also by Mozart, discovered this year in Vienna), the manuscript brings to light "a whole new aspect of him that we knew very little about," Pearlman continues. "[His] Magic Flute suddenly is not just an isolated work of genius, but the culmination of a series of fairy-tale operas."
Buch got his first clue in 1993, during a trip from the University of Northern Iowa at Cedar Falls to Hamburg while researching a book on fairy-tale operas. When Buch mentioned his interest in 18th-century opera to a local librarian, he was told about a trove of 2,000 manuscripts from the Hamburg city theater that the Russians had seized at the end of World War II. The documents had recently been discovered in a flooded St. Petersburg basement, the librarian said, and would be returned to Hamburg after they had been restored. "I didn't expect to find anything," says Buch, who nonetheless went back to look in 1996.
What he found were two leather-bound volumes containing a score of The Philosopher's Stone—a collaborative opera about a woman who begins to meow like a cat. Scholars had long suspected that Mozart had penned a small part of one of the opera's duets; Buch found Mozart's name not only on the duet but also on two segments of the second-act finale. As Buch knew, confirmation of his discovery would stand the classical-music world on its ear. "I was pretty excited," he says.
Worried about getting scooped, he managed to keep his discovery secret for a year; England's prestigious Cambridge Opera Journal finally published his findings in 1997. And while any Mozart news is stunning enough, Buch's low-profile academic affiliation proved nearly unbelievable to Genevieve Geffray, head librarian at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, who, according to Buch, was moved to ask, "Where, please, is Iowa?"
The younger son of Morris, an accountant who died in 1981, and Mildred, a homemaker and amateur pianist who died in 1996, Buch grew up in suburban Oak Park, Mich., in a house filled with music. David developed a keen interest in composers from Chopin to Dylan. "He wanted to know the stories behind the music," recalls brother Larry, 51, an automotive engineer who lives in nearby Farmington Hills.
After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, Buch earned a Ph.D. in music history from Northwestern University in 1983. Two years later he joined the faculty at the 13,000-student University of Northern Iowa, best known as a teacher's college, where he spends much of his free time researching the history of classical music. "I look at marvelous things nobody's seen," says Buch. "I get this really special feeling for that time and place, almost like I've been there."
These days Buch, who is single and lives with his Cable grand piano in an apartment in Iowa City, 80 miles south of Cedar Falls, hopes to cowrite a book about his discovery and Mozart's quest for success. And though a few dissenting musicologists doubt that Mozart contributed to more than the duet in The Philosopher's Stone, Buch remains unfazed. It's also impossible, he points out, "to prove that Shake's speare wrote those plays."
Peter Ames Carlin
Hayes Ferguson in Farmington Hills
- Contributors:
- Hayes Ferguson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
