The Borrowed Teacher
Track eighteen was the longest thing on the album. Track nineteen lasts two and a half minutes, and it brings back an old acquaintance.
The facts. Track nineteen runs two minutes and twenty-nine seconds. It is Fritz Kreisler’s Andantino in the Style of Martini. The credit is the same as on track eighteen: Arr. Garrett / Haywood for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra, with Julien Quentin, Franck van der Heijden, Orchestra the Prezent and John Haywood conducting.
Kreisler again. Track six was his hunt “by Jean-Baptiste Cartier”. The Andantino comes from the same drawer. Schott published it in Mainz in 1910, as No. 2 of the “Classical Manuscripts” Kreisler said he had found in old libraries. In 1935 he admitted he had written them himself. The whole story is here.
So this time we won’t ask who wrote it. We’ll ask about the name.
Bologna, 1706. Giovanni Battista Martini is born there. In 1725 he becomes chapelmaster at the church of San Francesco. In 1729 he is ordained, and from then on he is Padre Martini.
He composes a great deal. His music is far less familiar today than his name as a teacher.
Teaching is what made him famous. Musicians came to Bologna from all over Europe to study with him: Johann Christian Bach, Gluck, Jommelli, Grétry.
He collected, too. The English historian Charles Burney put his library at seventeen thousand volumes. Much of it survives in Bologna, at the heart of the city’s music museum.
In 1770 a boy from Salzburg arrives in Bologna with his father. He is fourteen. He wants to join the Accademia Filarmonica, and to get in he has to pass an exam in strict old counterpoint.
Martini helps him. He passes.
The exam piece survives, and it is dated.
9 October 1770.
The boy is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Immortal came out on 9 October 2026. A coincidence, and we know it. We’re keeping it anyway.
Seven years later Martini asked for a portrait of Mozart for his collection of musicians. One was sent from Salzburg in 1777. It is still in Bologna.
Why did Kreisler pick Martini? He never said, and as with Cartier we won’t guess.
Cartier was a forgotten man. Martini wasn’t. His books, his library and his pupils all outlived him.
On 12 September 2026, in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Garrett played the Andantino in public. As far as we know, it was his first time. We were there.
He opened that evening with another Kreisler forgery, Tempo di Minuetto “by Pugnani”. He closed it with Mozart, on Mozart’s own violin.
So Garrett brought Kreisler’s borrowed Martini to the town of Martini’s most famous pupil.
As on track eighteen, the credit names a guitar and an orchestra, and what you hear is a violin and a piano: Garrett and Julien Quentin. That is what Kreisler wrote it for.
On Garrett’s published repertoire list, the Andantino has one recording against it: Immortal.
This series keeps asking what carries music past the people who made it.
Track eighteen travelled with a story that may not be true. Track nineteen travels with a name that was never its own.
Two minutes and twenty-nine seconds. The eighteenth century you hear in it is Kreisler’s. The name is Martini’s. The town was Mozart’s.
Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — from 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep walking through it.
Sources & notes: the album credit as printed by Deutsche Grammophon and david-garrett.com; the first edition from Schott’s catalogue and IMSLP; the “Classical Manuscripts” and Kreisler’s admission from Hyperion’s programme notes and the Library of Congress; Padre Martini’s life, pupils and library from Britannica; Mozart’s Bologna exam from King’s College London’s Mozart & Material Culture and the dated exam piece, K. 86; the portrait from the Italian Ministry of Culture’s catalogue; the Salzburg concert from our own reporting (12 September 2026); Garrett’s recordings from david-garrett.com. We don’t say why Kreisler chose Martini, because he never said.