Mozart in Prague

Abstract

Mozart in Prague is a collection of essays that derives from a joint conference of the Mozart Society of America and the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music (together with the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences) held at Prague in June 2009. The title is a bit of a misnomer: some of the essays having nothing to do with Mozart and Prague, some have nothing to do with Prague, and some have nothing to do with Mozart. Understandably a conference of this sort will include a number of papers only tangentially related to the topic at hand, and that’s all to the good. But a more appropriate title could have been found for this book in particular. The non-Mozart, non-Prague articles include R. Todd Rober’s ‘A paternal patronage in Dresden: Count Heinrich von Brühl and Gottlob Harrer’, Jane Schatkin Hettrick’s ‘Antonio Salieri’s Requiem Mass: the Moravian connection’ and Lucio Tufano’s ‘The Italian reception of Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea: fascination and compromise’, while the non-Mozart articles, or those only very tenuously related to Mozart, include John Rice’s ‘A Bohemian composer meets a Mozart singer: Koželuh’s Rondò for Adriana Ferrarese’ and the late Pierluigi Petrobelli’s ‘Guardasoni and Italian opera’. The non-Prague articles include Martin Nedbal’s ‘Preaching (German) morals in Vienna: the case of Mozart and Umlauf’ and Anna Ryszka-Komarnicka’s ‘From Venice to Warsaw: Zenobia di Palmira by Sertor and Anfossi performed by Guardasoni’s troupe (1791)’. Even if they do not directly relate to ‘Mozart in Prague’, these articles nevertheless contribute to our understanding of the broader musical cultures Mozart may have encountered, and in particular to some of the characters who played important roles in Mozart’s Viennese career or during his travels, as well as in the reception of his works.