'Lost' ballet music discovered by Yorkshire student after 200 years

Music from Europe Riconosciuta, which was created by Italian composer Antonio Salieri, was played by the Lincoln Pro Musica Orchestra.

The music, which is called Pafio e Mirra, was discovered by PhD student Ellen Stokes in the Austria National Library archive.

She found the piece “jumbled up” within the pages of four manuscripts and then restructured the music together using Salieri's handwritten notes.

Speaking before the performance, Ellen said it was “amazing” to have discovered something that was thought to be lost.

She said: “Putting all the information together has helped me put together what I believe is the full ballet which was a very exciting finding within this research.

“To have found something thought to be lost was amazing. It would be great to get more of his works programmed.

“I will keep researching Salieri and try to bring this music to a wider audience and a wider understanding.”

Salieri was one of Europe's best-known composers at the time of his death in 1825.

The opera premiered in Milan, Italy in 1778 and was performed again in 2004 but without the ballet section.

However Ms Stokes says that in the 18th century it was very rare for a composer to write the ballet for his own opera.

She said: “I believe that I have restructured one of his ballets, an inter-act ballet from one of his operas called Europa Riconosciuta, premiered in Milan in 1778.

“It was his first international opera, commissioned by Gluck, and was his international break, with the ballet coming in the middle of the opera.

“This ballet was believed lost in its full state, and scholars thought it only existed in a fragmentary form.

“It was a narrative within a narrative, so it is a very interesting case study.”

Dr Steven Jan, who is Ms Stokes PhD supervisor at the University of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, says Ms Stokes has “done really well” to find the piece.

He said: “It shows how important the skills of musicology are, in that researchers can be presented with evidence, and still have to do a lot of digging and lateral thinking to make it coherent.”