Hermann Abert's Biography of Mozart

Abstract

Of all the older musical biographies I have read in recent years, the most impressive has been Hermann Abert's reworking of Otto Jahn's monumental and pioneering Mozart biography.' Abert was clearly an extraordinary musicologist and a profound thinker about the tasks of musicology. In the course of reading this biography it also becomes obvious that he was a fine musician whose analyses, which must have been based on score reading with or without piano, still stand as brilliant. In addition he possessed the wide musical knowledge that in our age of specialization has become rare if not extinct. In the accumulating literature of musicology, with its thousands of minutely detailed factual studies, the historian can no longer see far beyond his particular expertise, be it a period, person, genre or theoretical speciality. Abert's kind of scholarship, as well informed about Greek antiquity as Beethoven's chamber music or eighteenth-century symphonies, is simply no longer possible. Men such as Jahn and Abert, Hugo Riemann, and Curt Sachs have gone the way of the dinosaur, no longer suited to the environment though not antique enough for their bones to have been enshrined in museums. The fact is that we tend to treat our