Leopold Mozart Research Articles

Sprachvariation im 18. Jahrhundert. Die Briefe der Familie Mozart Teil II

Abstract In the second half of the eighteenth century, a far-reaching change took place in the language of Southern Germany and Austria. This change from the traditional baroque Upper German written language [oberdeutsche Schreibsprache] to modern High German occurred not only in the language of printing, but also in private letters. One result of this transition is a broad variety of linguistic forms. The extensive correspondence between members of the Mozart family (father, mother, daughter, son) is an extremely useful subject for the investigation of this language variation. After a series of introductory sections, the usage of written language by the different members of the family will be analyzed in part one of this paper. The range of variety reaches from Leopold Mozart's modern, educated German to the traditional, partly colloquial language of Mozart's mother. A separate chapter deals with W. A. Mozart's creative use of language (and varieties), his fancy for artificial jokes and word play [Sprachspiele]. Part two deals with the question of what we can learn from the written language of the letters about how the Mozarts spoke with each other and with other members of their society.

Sprachvariation im 18. Jahrhundert. Die Briefe der Familie Mozart Teil I

Abstract In the second half of the eighteenth century, a far-reaching change took place in the language of Southern Germany and Austria. This change from the traditional baroque Upper German written language [oberdeutsche Schreibsprache] to modern High German occurred not only in the language of printing, but also in private letters. One result of this transition is a broad variety of linguistic forms. The extensive correspondence between members of the Mozart family (father, mother, daughter, son) is an extremely useful object for the investigation of this language variation. After a series of introductory sections, the usage of written language by the different members of the family will be analyzed in part one of this paper. The range of variety reaches from Leopold Mozart's modern, educated German to the traditional, partly colloquial language of Mozart's mother. A separate chapter deals with W. A. Mozart's creative use of language (and varieties), his fancy for artificial jokes und word play [Sprachspiele]. Part two deals with the question of what we can learn from the written language of the letters about how the Mozarts spoke with each other and with other members of their society.

NEWLY DISCOVERED LEOPOLD MOZART SOURCES AT WOLFEGG CASTLE

While cataloguing the music manuscripts held at the Kunstsammlungen der Fürsten zu Waldburg-Wolfegg at Wolfegg Castle, Dr Gertraut Haberkamp discovered a complex of eight works by Leopold Mozart among its holdings. It consists of six symphonies, three of them previously unknown, and two further sets of parts, one for the widely known divertimento the Musikalische Schlittenfahrt, the other for the Oratorium pro quadragesima. RISM mentions the types of paper the manuscripts are written on, but only one, and does not identify them at all. In the case of Leopold Mozart copies, however, it is important to assess the closeness of a copy to the composer as there are only a few surviving autographs. And here two different complexes can be identified: the instrumental works on the one hand, and the Oratorium pro quadragesima on the other.

Taboo and Biographical Innovation: Mozart, Beethoven, Shubert

The lives of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert offer instances in which materials sufficient to lead to significant discoveries had long been available, but their implications had been overlooked by generations of scholars. Such biographical innovations may be blocked by taboos centering on sexuality, ancestry, power, and authority. In Mozart's life, taboo attaches to his penchant for obscenity and the carnivalesque; to Leopold Mozart's domination of his children and to his disinheritance of Mozart; and to the stench of decay that emanated from Mozart's dying body. In Beethoven's case, taboos are invoked in connection with birth and ancestry fantasies, derivatives of a proliferating family romance. With Schubert, taboo centers on his openness to unorthodox sexual experience, including homosexuality. In many instances, taboos of a psychological and institutional nature block the emergence of biographical innovations, which are avoided because they partake of the forbidden. Thus, a central problem for historians is to locate sources of authorization to recognize and perhaps to resolve biographical taboos. Is psychoanalysis, which enjoins us to interrogate every detail of a person's life, including thoughts and dreams, an appropriate theory for such investigations of pathways through the tangle of prohibitions a biographer must negotiate? Or is it, too, implicated in its own particular set of taboos?

History and Performance Practices

The study of performance practices in history has continued to attract considerable scholarly interest. It has also, predictably, come through a process of self-examination that has exploded rudimentary claims to authenticity and reliability. An era of innocence and enthusiasm has passed. Treatises from the past, whether by Johann Joachim Quantz for the flute or Leopold Mozart, Pierre Baillot, Louis Spohr, and CharlesAuguste de Beriot for the violin, are no longer regarded as straightforward sources about how things were actually done. Likewise, eyewitness accounts and oral traditions regarding the habits of past performers, particularly from eras before recording, are viewed more critically. Fashions regarding so-called authenticity in the performance of music from the past have changed. Each fashion in turn has been interpreted as mirroring a contemporary prejudice rather than the objective results of verifiable empirical research. The attempt to recover memory as to how music was performed has begun to struggle in greater detail with regional differences—microclimates of a kind—and with the evident gaps between published tracts and polemics and everyday habits. An analogy can be made to the history of church doctrine and theology: orthodoxies and normative ideals are articulated and disseminated by authorities, but these do not necessarily predict or define the actual local character of routine and regular worship in the past. What has emerged as even more problematic is the task of connecting historic performance practices to the ascription of meaning within musical events on the part of past performers and audiences. Even if one could reconstruct how a work was played, the purpose and effect of the music and the details of its performance, understood in terms of the impact on past audiences, remain elusive. If the uses of rubato, portamento, and even vibrato were differentiated and widespread, what did those specific habits signify and what meaning did they carry? Our aesthetic tastes and acoustic expectations clearly have changed. If one wanted to reproduce not the sounds but the impact of the past, what performance decisions would one make when facing a twenty-first-century

Prodigies of nature

On 31 May 1764 the following notice appeared in the London Public Advertiser: 'At the Great Room in Spring Garden, near St James' Park, Tuesday June 5, will be performed a grand concert of vocal and instrumental music. For the benefit of Miss Mozart of eleven and Master Mozart of seven years of age, Prodigies of Nature; taking the opportunity of representing to the public the greatest prodigy that Europe or that human nature has to boast of. Everybody will be astonished to hear a child of such a tender age playing the harpsichord in such perfection—it surmounts all fantastic imagination and it is hard to express which is more astounding, his execution upon the harpsichord playing at sight or his own compositions.'1 Even when we allow for Leopold Mozart's hyperboles and the fact that he deducted a year from his children's ages, young Wolfgang was clearly one of the great musical prodigies. Prodigies have always been regarded with awe because they disobey the usual rules of childhood development. A study of their lives shows that various factors are involved in the determination of their extraordinary achievements. High ability may be linked to creativity but what is most easily measured is performance.

Minuet Form and Phraseology in Recueils and Manuscript Tunebooks

In 1762 Giovanni-Andre Gallini praised the minuet because of ... the possibility of dancing it to so many different airs, though the steps are invariable.' Two years later, Leopold Mozart reported from Paris: .. . In the whole town there are about two or three favourite minuets, which must always be played, because the people cannot dance to any save those particular ones during the playing of which they learned to dance. Who was right? And if both sources are equally authoritative, how do we explain their sharply differing testimony? The evidence of what I will call the official sources (by which I mean the sources most examined in musicological and dance-historical research) suggests that minuet music and minuet dancing were characterized by uniformity, regularity, inflexibility. There are only around forty minuet choreographies in manuals written by dancing masters, and each one is tailored, measure by measure, to a specific melody.3 Virtually all minuets in art music adhere to one format: the minuet and trio, with a fairly predictable length and internal structure. And throughout the eighteenth century, teachers like Mattheson, Riepel, and Koch emphasize the metrical regularity of minuets, based on the eight-measure phrase, which is supposedly essential to dancing the minuet well.4 Any

Leopold Mozart's Consumption

Leopold Mozart's Consumption

The Orchestral Serenade in eighteenth‐Century Salzburg1

The Salzburg serenade repertory is defined and analyzed through two lines of investigation. A discussion of terms and terminology related to the social history of serenading in Salzburg allows for many surviving works of Salzburg composers to be identified as serenades. A second line of investigation focuses on the larger orchestral serenades, examining the characteristic features of the Salzburg repertory. These include the semi‐independence of the opening march, characteristic instrumentation, and two‐ and three‐movement cycles of concerto movements. In addition, the Salzburg orchestral serenades of the 1760s and 1770s move from being dominated by concerto movements to a movement‐sequence with more of a balance between symphonic and concerto movements. Works by Leopold Mozart, Michael Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Joseph Hafeneder are discussed in relation to this development.

MOZART'S GOOD FRIEND DR LAUGIER

IN SEPTEMBER 1767 the Mozart family paid a visit to Vienna with a view to Wolfgang's taking part in the celebrations for the forthcoming marriage of the Empress Maria Theresa's daughter, Archduchess Maria Josepha, to King Ferdinand of Naples. On 17 October, a month or so after their arrival, Leopold Mozart wrote a letter to his friend and landlord Lorenz Hagenauer in which he refers to their seeing a good deal of a certain M. De L'Augier. However, it was not long before Leopold was horrified to find that a smallpox epidemic was raging in the city, to which the seventeen-year-old archduchess succumbed. Terrified for the lives of his children, Leopold says that he and Wolfgang left their lodgings and took refuge with someone he calls 'my good friend', who strongly advised that the whole family should remove themselves from Vienna immediately. There is reason to believe that the 'good friend' was M. De L'Augier.1 In his letters Leopold subsequently makes several enigmatic references to M. De L'Augier, but without explaining the identity of this clearly influential figure, who became involved in the young Mozart's musical career. In fact, he was Dr Alexandre-Louis Laugier (1719-74), a physician to the imperial court; a study of his life is therefore worthy of interest. We know little about Laugier's early years, but it is known that he was the son of an apothecary in Nancy and studied medicine at the University of Leiden, which boasted one of the most famous medical schools in Europe.2 He then went to Vienna, where he established himself as a doctor and rose rapidly in his profession; he became imperial court physician probably at the invitation of Gerhard van Swieten, personal physician to the empress, founder of the university's medical school and himself a product of Leiden. It is known that in 1749 Alexandre-Louis strongly supported the move of his younger brother, Dr Francois Robert Laugier (1722-93), to Vienna to take up the newly created chair of Botany and Chemistry at the university. The appointment proved to be disastrous, however, because the younger Laugier later quarrelled with his immediate superior, van Swieten, who reported that he was incompetent in his two subjects, ignorant of Latin and, moreover, indolent. In 1768 Francois Robert was dismissed from his post without a pension.3 In contrast, his elder brother retained the confidence of the royal family, was greatly sought after as a physician, and became a most influential figure in Viennese society.

NEW LIGHT ON THE MOZARTS' LONDON VISIT: A PRIVATE CONCERT WITH MANZUOLI

Journal Article NEW LIGHT ON THE MOZARTS' LONDON VISIT: A PRIVATE CONCERT WITH MANZUOLI Get access IAN WOODFIELD IAN WOODFIELD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 76, Issue 2, May 1995, Pages 187–208, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/76.2.187 Published: 01 May 1995

Mozart: portrait of a genius

need for love had grown uncertain of itself in early childhood. His feeling of being unloved found constant confirmation in his changing experiences over the years, and the intensity of his unsatisfied desire to be loved, detectable as a dominant wish throughout his life, very largely determined what had meaning for him and what did not. - From the book. One of the most important social thinkers of our time provides a haunting portrait of Mozart's life and creative genius. German sociologist Norbert Elias examines the paradoxes in Mozart's short existence - his brilliant creativity and social marginality, his musical sophistication and personal crudeness, his breathtaking accomplishments and deep despair. Using psychoanalytic insights, Elias examines Leopold Mozart's carefully honed ambitions for his son and protege. From the age of six Mozart traveled with his father, performing in the major courts throughout Europe.The elder Mozart worked on his son like a sculptor on his sculpture, and this deep bond formed the lietmotif in understanding Mozart's early talent and complicated psyche. Mozart chafed at the constraints of Viennese courtly culture. Growing up in a society which viewed musicians as manual laborers producing entertainment for the court, he fought for an independent livelihood. Vienna's aristocracy ultimately turned its back on the composer, who faced mounting debts, no work, and no prospect of fulfilling his innermost desires. He died feeling that his life had become empty of meaning. Elias ponders the concept of genius, which he sees as a complex marriage of fantasy, inspiration, and convention. In exploring the tension between personal creativity and the tastes of an era, he gives us a book of startling insight and discovery.

Authenticity in Performance: Eighteenth-Century Case Studies

List of music examples Preface Acknowledgements 1. The spirit of authenticity 2. Bach's C major Prelude, BWV 870 and 870a 3. Corelli's Violin Sonata, Op. 5, No. 11 4. Couperin and the French style 5. Bach's Overture in D, BWV 1068 6. Handel's Messiah 7. Bach's C minor Passacaglia (BWV 582) 8. The classical style, a change of direction 9. Leopold Mozart and the K421 Quartet 10. Haydn's Drum Roll Symphony No. 103 11. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and late eighteenth-century pianism Notes.

THE TWO VERSIONS OF MOZART'S DIVERTIMENTO K. 113

MOZART'S DIVERTIMENTO K. 113 survives in two autograph sources - a full score for two clarinets, two horns and strings and a wind score for pairs of oboes, English horns and bassoons. The title-page of the full score has Leopold Mozart's annotation 'Concerto o Sia Divertimento a 8 del Sgr: Cavaliere Amadeo Wolfgango Mozart in milano' and the date 'Novemb: 1771'. The wind score carries no date or place of composition. It is not selfsufficient and must therefore be an emendation to the full score. Giinter Hausswald considered the wind score to be an addition to the original work.' Such a cumulative reading would produce a wind band with pairs of oboes, English horns, clarinets, horns and bassoons. This unusually rich wind scoring, together with Leopold's provocative title-page for the full score suggested to Hausswald that the young Mozart was endeavouring to appeal to a Milanese musical taste. Consequently, he proposed that the divertimentos K.186 (159b) and K.166 (159d)-each scored for the same five wind instruments in pairs, but without strings - are likewise part of this Mozart-Milan nexus. A cumulative reading of K. 113 produces an abundance of wind couplings, especially between the clarinets and the oboes. This problematic doubling has encouraged two explanations. Working from the assumption that clarinets were not available to Mozart in Salzburg, Otto Jahn believed that Mozart refashioned K. 113 to exclude them.2 Jahn therefore considered the wind score to be an addition to the full score, except for the oboes, which were to substitute for the clarinets. Hausswald also presumed that clarinets were not available in Salzburg, but because the added wind score carries no date or place of composition, and because Mozart made use of the same large wind ensemble in K. 186 and K. 166, Hausswald held to his theory of a cumulative reading. The presence of clarinets in the second version of K. 113 was, for him, evidence for a Milanese provenance. Concerning the problematic doubling, Hausswald concluded that Mozart was more inclined to resort to such excessive couplings when writing for the English horn and clarinet, instruments he considered to be less familiar to Mozart at that time. The undated wind score and the assumption that clarinets were not available in Salzburg allowed Hausswald andJahn to manipulate the circumstantial evidence in different ways. I believe, however, that the separate wind score was not intended to be added to the full score but was, rather, a substitution for both the clarinet and the horn parts. Jahn was close to the truth, but, as we shall see, for the wrong reasons.

20th-century analysis and Mozart performance

Artur Schnabel said that he liked to play music that was better than it could be performed. Mozart's music would certainly fit this description: no single performance of one of his great works could possibly bring to life all the facets of its structure and design or all its expressive depth and range. I might add that his music is also better than it can be analysed. I have worked on some pieces for 30 years and more, getting closer to them, I hope, but never feeling that I have reached a 'definitive' understanding. In the quixotic attempt to reach such an understanding, whatever it might be, I have perhaps learned more than if I had set my sights on an attainable goal. And I am sure that performers who try to match the structural richness, emotional depth and easy, unpretentious perfection of Mozart's music in their approach to playing and singing become better performers, and not only of Mozart. In many ways, analysis and performance are related activities. Every analysis is a kind of conceptualized performance, and every performance embodies an implicit analysis. One would imagine, therefore, that performers and analysts would want to share and learn from one another's perspectives. Indeed, one would imagine that, to some extent, analysts and performers would be the same people. On the whole, however, performers tend to be resistant to analysis, even to doing it themselves; and in this regard players of period instruments are not so different from their colleagues who play modern instruments. Insofar as resistance to analysis stems from a distrust of abstract and sterile intellectualism, it is an understandable and even healthy attitude. Performers, after all, have to use their ears, muscles and hearts as well as their minds. But insightful analysis can speak to ears and hearts-sometimes even to muscles-as well as to minds; and there are good reasons why Mozartians might investigate what theory and analysis have to offer them. First of all, the performing milieu of Mozart's time included a good deal of consciousness about theoretical issues. The great teaching manuals of the middle and late 18th century-Quantz, C. P. E. Bach and Leopold Mozart, among others-discuss such aspects of playing as articulation, dynamics and ornamentation in close connection with melodic contour and harmonic structure. For the most part, however, they enunciate general principles-valid, important principles, to be sure, but of necessity not always applicable to specific situations, for the principles that deal with the articulation of the musical surface may conflict with those that deal with tonal structure. Both Leopold Mozart and C. P. E. Bach, for example, tell us that the first note under a slur gets an accent; they also tell us that chromatically altered notes are to be emphasized.' But they don't tell us what to do when, say, the second note under a two-note slur is chromatically altered. And, indeed, no set of precepts, no matter how cleverly conceived, can be adequate to the complexities of musical experience. The only way to approach these complexities is through study of the individual piece, and here 20thcentury analysis can often provide helpful insights. No earlier period has produced so large a body of work devoted to the close study of musical compositions; and if many of the concepts of modern analysts were unknown to theorists of Mozart's time, it does not follow that they have no bearing on his music. Such writers as Tovey, Schoenberg, Lowinsky and Rosen, to name a few, have much to teach us. But since my own work has followed the approach of Heinrich Schenker, it is mainly is ideas that I am going to discuss here. I believe that Schenker went beyond any previous theorist or analyst in the depth and scope of his insights, but his point of departure was, more often than not, the theoretical sy tems of the 18th century-thoroughbass, species counterpoint and, despite his attacks on Rameau, Rameauvian fundamental bass. Incidentally, Schenker was far in advance of his time in his ideas about performance practice. Early in the century he was urging performers to revive continuo playing, to learn stylistic lly appropriate ornamentation, to pay attention to Beethoven's metronome markings (he had more faith in them than I do), and to discard the featureless continuous legato suggested by the 'phrasing slurs' of corrupt editions in favour of the varied and lively articulation shown in the composers' autographs. Mozart's music is better than even Schenker can analyse, but his ideas can bring performers closer to it, as I shall try to show. In this paper I shall relate these ideas to aspects of Mozart performance practice, concentrating to a large extent on the implications of Mozart's slur markings. One of Schenker's most important ideas is what he calls the Auskomponierung eines Klanges, the composing

The old and new Mozart editions

The old and new Mozart editions Get access Cliff Eisen Cliff Eisen Professor at New York University. He is the author of the recently published New Mozart Documents and the editor of a forthcoming volume, Mozart Studies. Among his editions are the symphonies of Leopold Mozart and W. A. Mozart's ‘Linz’ Symphony. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Early Music, Volume XIX, Issue 4, November 1991, Pages 513–532, https://doi.org/10.1093/earlyj/XIX.4.513 Published: 01 November 1991

An early Handel revival in Florence

The vigour that characterized Florentine musical life during the second half of the 18th century owed much to the musical patronage of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, who ruled Tuscany from 1765 to 1790. Born in Vienna in 1747, Pietro Leopoldo was trained not only as a sovereign but as a musician, at a court where the patronage of music was a regular part of daily business. He took naturally to the idea that he should attend to the same business in Tuscany, and he assembled in Florence a group of musicians of considerable talent and fame. The singers Giovanni Manzuoli and Ferdinando Tenducci, the violin virtuoso Pietro Nardini and the flautist Niccolo Dotel counted themselves among Pietro Leopoldo's virtuosi di camera, the distinguished composer of music for chamber and church Carl'Antonio Campion served Pietro Leopoldo as maestro di cappella in charge of sacred music; Marchese Eugenio di Ligniville, praised by Leopold Mozart as 'the best contrapuntist in all Italy', directed the performance of secular music at court. The Grand Duke took an active interest in ballet

Analysing the violin

At its first meeting this session some 170 members and visitors of the Guildford Sub-branch of the Institute were entertained (and instructed!) by Dr Alan Kiss using a formidable array of instruments, both musical and electronic, to demonstrate aspects of the acoustics of the violin. He quoted Leopold Mozart (father of Wolfgang) who in 1756 considered that the 'proportioning of the parts' was the reason why some violins sounded shrill, others wooden, and that there were no 'fixed principles' to allow one to decide the correct proportions.

The Letters of Mozart and His Family.

The first journey, undertaken without Frau Mozart, was to Munich, where Leopold Mozart performed with his two children before the Elector Maximilian III. They were absent about three weeks, from 12 January to the beginning of February 1762. There are no letters describing this visit.

THE VIOLIN AND ITS TECHNIQUE IN THE 18TH CENTURY

T HE publication of the first English translation of Leopold Mozart's Violinschule in 1948 has directed attention to violin technique in the 18th century and created an auspicious occasion to review the entire subject. The most direct access to information of this sort is through the violin methods of the time. Although the music of the period often reflects more advanced practices than the methods, the printed notes of the scores merely furnish the skeleton of that music. The clue to the music's true physiognomy, which is revealed largely through the details of performance, lies concealed in the methods. The information gleaned from violin methods' has been amplified and checked by some music,2 by experi-