Mozart Family Research Articles

‘ich meÿne ich mus die füsse ins Maull schieben vor müedigkeit’: Betrachtungen über die Rolle der arbeitenden Frau in den Briefen der Familie Mozart und Caroline Pichlers ‘Über die Bildung des weiblichen Geschlechtes’

ABSTRACT Caroline Pichler’s 1810 essay, ‘Über die Bildung des weiblichen Geschlechtes’ [On the Education of the Female Sex], cautiously advocates for limited employment opportunities for women across the social classes. Interestingly, the author seems to assume women had not previously worked. Some forty years prior, the Mozart family, including young Wolfgang Amadeus, embarked on a two-decade journey across England, Italy, France, and Germany, aiming to secure his appointment as a court musician. Despite gaps in the records, the letters exchanged during these trips emphasize the Mozarts’ collaborative efforts to improve their livelihood and advance the children’s prospects. In contrast to common stereotypes of female passivity, the mother, Anna Maria, is actively involved in business matters, corresponding with Leopold’s business partners, and sharing decision-making responsibilities. Comparing the Mozart letters with Pichler’s essay highlights the evolving discourse on gender roles and work from the late eighteenth to the early nineteeth centuries.

See Sharp: Discord across Portraits of the Mozart Family Attributed to Carmontelle

Abstract Louis Carrogis called Carmontelle was a French amateur draftsman whose association with the royal Orléans court in the final decades of the ancien régime afforded him direct access to Enlightenment luminaries, celebrities, and elites. Carmontelle created a well-known triple-portrait drawing of Leopold, Maria Anna, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during the family’s 1763–64 stay in France. Four museums—two in France and two in the United Kingdom—claim to count autograph versions of this triple portrait (in other words, in Carmontelle’s own hand) among their collections. Close examination of these triple portraits—in the collections of the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the Musée Condé in Chantilly, the British Museum in London, and Castle Howard in Yorkshire—reveals, however, that three of these four works are not autograph drawings by Carmontelle. In fact, one of these three sheets is not a drawing at all. This essay examines the origins of these misattributions and some of the reasons for their perpetuation. More broadly, it cautions against accepting prestigious provenances at face value and demonstrates the value of close, prolonged looking and careful comparative analysis.

THE MOZARTS’ VIENNESE LODGINGS IN 1762 AND THE HOUSE ZUM ROTHEN SÄBEL

ABSTRACTIt is generally believed that when the Mozart family arrived in Vienna on 6 October 1762, they initially may have spent a night or two in the inn ‘Zum weißen Ochsen’ on Fleischmarkt, then moved for the remainder of their stay to lodgings on Tiefer Graben, either in a house belonging to Johann Heinrich Ditscher (Otto Erich Deutsch, 1961) or one belonging to Gottlieb Friedrich Fischer (Walter Brauneis, 1991). All modern Mozart biographies transmit either Deutsch's claim or Brauneis's, and many continue to state that the Mozarts stayed at ‘Zum weißen Ochsen’. We have been able to show that none of these claims has any merit, and no primary evidence supports them. The notion that the Mozarts stayed at ‘Zum weißen Ochsen’ can be traced back to an article published in 1860, where it is asserted without evidence; the idea was then popularized in a children's story about Wolfgang. The claim that the Mozarts lodged on Tiefer Graben is based on a fanciful interpretation of a mistranscribed street name in Schiedermair's 1914 edition of Leopold Mozart's letter of 19 October 1762.Leopold actually wrote that the family lodged in ‘Fierberggaßl’. We argue that this refers to the still-existing Färbergasse, and that the Mozarts may have stayed in a house on that street (today the site of Färbergasse 3), with a long narrow wing fitting Leopold's description of their cramped quarters. We present other new details about this episode in Wolfgang's early life, including the identity of a customs official to whom he played a minuet on the violin, and the literary source of Leopold's remark that their lodgings were ‘1000 Schritt lang und 1. Schritt breit’. We also discuss the history of the house name ‘Zum rothen Säbel’, which is used incorrectly in the Mozart literature; at the time of the Mozarts’ visit in 1762, it referred to the house on Färbergasse in which – we argue – they actually stayed.

Biography as Compilation: How to Encode Georg Nikolaus Nissen’s Biographie W. A. Mozart’s (1828) in TEI P5

The project of editing the early Biographie W. A. Mozart’s (1828) by Georg Nikolaus Nissen (Nissen Online) began as part of the Digital Mozart-Edition (DME) at the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg. The aim of the edition is to reveal the structure of the text by identifying the diverse sources Nissen relied on when writing the biography. These include primary sources such as original letters and documents from the Mozart family, secondary sources such as contemporary literature about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and original text written by the author and later editors. Considering the challenges that arise when creating an edition that tries to define the different strands of a text, this paper describes how XML/TEI markup was applied to encode text passages which often do not correlate with common text structures (paragraphs, chapters); document different types of sources and their authors or editors; and integrate a detailed bibliography of the sources as well as critical annotations for each single text passage.

Correspondance littéraire by Friedrich Melchior Grimm Ulla KölvingMélinda Carón

MLR, .,   Gallagher argues in her introduction, the works chosen have been those oriented towards the Anglo-Saxon world. is justifies Gallagher’s translation of Hiver caraïbe,whichgivesusasenseofMorandasindefatigablecosmopolitanglobetrotter. First published in , Caribbean Winter remassages notes from two journeys to the Caribbean and America made two years before. With Morand we cross the Atlantic: ‘Flying fish. e ship slows down, inching forward in a gelatinous light that is occasionally broken by a dorsal flash of shark. e walls of my cabin creak like a stove over-filled with fuel’ (p. ). We land at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and very soon may be made uncomfortable by Morand’s outlook: ‘It is quite obvious that all the Negroes here have the vote. ey are wearing the stony, hostile and malevolent expressions of people set to nurse their bad humour for another four years’ (p. ). ere follow Port of Spain, Venezuela, Curaçao, Haiti, Cuba, then a magnificent coda devoted to Mexico and southern California. In his elliptical and allusive style, Morand remarks on people, politics, landscape, literature, and art. Morand is obsessed with racial and national difference, and the Caribbean crucible is a perfect environment for him to explore. What haunts him is the threat of métissage and the destruction of the racial ecology he seeks to protect: ‘Black and white are both beautiful; what’s ugly is grey’ (p. ). As Gallagher points out, in this age of trigger warnings, the world of Morand is a distinctly unsafe space. On the other hand, Paul Morand, with his brittle European arrogance and adumbrations of mass migration and global miscegenation, could be considered a postcolonial studies wet dream. Gallagher makes some very astute points. First, Morand seems attracted to a form of American Sublime, which explains why, on arriving on the islands, he immediately makes for the highlands, and devotes so many pages to Mexico and the Apache Trail, making no mention of the Deep South he travelled through in . What is also striking is how the synchronic staccato of Morand’s travelogue occludes the history of slavery. On the other hand, Gallagher suggests that, in his descriptions of the vestiges of Aztec and Maya civilizations, he is, unconsciously, making us think of other Caribbean peoples destroyed by the arrival of the white man. ere are a couple of factual errors in Gallagher’s introduction: Ouvert la nuit is not set in London—in fact, the only story touching British soil is ‘La Nuit écossaise ’; Morand wrote about the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and not the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, such quibbles apart, this book is beautifully written and translated, helpfully annotated, and gloriously ‘incorrect’. U  S A G B Correspondance littéraire. By F M G. Ed. by U K. Vol. : . Ed. by M C. Fernay-Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du e Siècle. . lxxx+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. If the Correspondance littéraire for  ended with Grimm expressing his astonishment at the talent of the seven-year-old Mozart, he began , despite suffering  Reviews from a fever, by offering significant support for the Mozart family until their departure from Paris in April. While we are indebted to the editor Mélinda Caron for this information, which is not mentioned in the Correspondance itself, this almost prophetic support of the cosmopolitan music of the future provides a striking contrast to Grimm’s negative reaction to the death of Rameau in September. Grimm was, of course, never a supporter of French music, but, with hindsight, the vehemence of his reaction to the demise of the man who would now be regarded as one of the two greatest French composers of the century makes for fascinating reading. ere is important writing on the plastic arts too, and if the enthusiastic article in the second issue for August concerning Drouais’s famous portrait of Madame de Pompadour is relatively brief, the lengthy essay reviewing the criticisms of Soufflot’s design for the church of Sainte Geneviève in the second issue for October leads to further extended essays in subsequent issues, first on the history of ecclesiastical architecture, then on the history of Christianity itself. Like ,  was a relatively poor year...

Review: Digital Mozart Edition (DME)

Digital Mozart Edition (DME) . Tobias Debuch, Managing Director; Christine Forstner, Yvonne Schwarte, Josef Erlinger, Online Team. URL: http://dme.mozarteum.at/DME/main/index.php?l=2 Like many online resources, the Digital Mozart Edition (DME) is a work in progress. That said, it already has much to offer, including material that for most people would previously have required a trip to one or more libraries, and much else not found in any library. The DME's plan of organization is explained on its home page as follows:1 > The Digital Mozart Edition (DME) is currently being developed at the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg (ISM) in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California, USA. The DME wishes to provide access to the complete works of Wolfgang Amade Mozart (1756–1791) in digital format via the internet for study and performance purposes. Subprojects include editions of the musical works, which are presented in the form of the NMA Online 2 (online since 2006) and in the form of a fully digital music edition ( DME::Music , under development),3 an edition of the texts to Mozart's dramatic works ( DME::Librettos )4 as well as an edition of the letters by the Mozart family and documents related to the family and history of the foundation ( DME::Letters & Documents ).5 The digital services of the DME are supplemented by catalogs and databases related to the musical works and their sources including information on their history and reception ( DME::Sources & Documentation …

MOZART'S BAWDY CANONS, VULGARITY AND DEBAUCHERY AT THE WIEDNERTHEATER

ABSTRACTMozart's bawdy canons and use of scatalogical parlance in his letters have been described as indicative of a personality given to crass expression. Moreover, his association with Emanuel Schikaneder's supposedly dissolute Theater auf der Wieden, a boisterous venue for German stage works, has been taken as further evidence of his profligate tendencies. A review of the original source materials reveals that these views are apocryphal, originating after Mozart's death and embellished in nineteenth-century commentary and scholarship. Examples of even raunchier canons, composed by musicians with connections to Mozart, Schikaneder and the Theater auf der Wieden, provide new insight into the genre. An examination of surviving bawdy Viennese canons in their social context, together with a reconsideration of the Mozart family letters and attitudes toward vulgarity in Viennese popular theatre, reveals that lewd expressions on the stage were relatively uncommon in this period, that Mozart's use of scatalogical language was relatively mild for the time and that accounts of the composer's debauchery in his last years have little evidentiary basis.

Leopold-Mozart-Werkverzeichnis (LMV) (review)

Reviewed by: Leopold-Mozart-Werkverzeichnis (LMV) Peter M. Alexander Leopold-Mozart-Werkverzeichnis (LMV). By Cliff Eisen, with assistance from Christian Broy. (Beiträge zur Leopold-Mozart-Forschung, vol. 4.) Augsburg: Wißner, 2010. [271 p. ISBN 9783896397577. €49,80.] Music examples, illustrations. Leopold Mozart is both one of the most familiar and one of the least known figures in music history. He is familiar through the life and career of his son, and through the extensive correspondence that lays bare the family drama that unfolded as Wolfgang was growing up. But apart from a couple of trivial works, he until recently remained relatively unknown as a musician and composer. The correspondence and other documentary records of the Mozart family show Leopold to have been a complex and ambiguous figure. Well educated for his times, he could be arrogant, suspicious, mercenary, and self-pitying, but he was also in his way a loving father and husband, a keen observer of his world, a gifted musician and teacher, and above all a conscientious and thoughtful guide for his phenomenal children. With such a complex personality, it is no surprise that Leopold has been a target for historians, or that his reputation has changed drastically over time. Already in the early twentieth century, Hermann Abert described this phenomenon when he wrote: In their desire to idealize everything to do with their hero, most older biographers, headed by Jahn, turned [Leopold] into the ideal father of a youthful genius, painting a romantic portrait of his character that does not correspond to the facts. More recently, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and the venerable patriarch has had to make way for a figure whose character is made up, in the main, of weaknesses such a pedantry, obstinacy, vanity, envy and petty bourgeois complacency, with the result that Leopold now seems very much to have been his son's nemesis. This curious volte-face merely proves how hard it is to remain objective towards the fathers of great men. (W. A. Mozart, trans. Steward Spencer, ed. Cliff Eisen [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007], 6.) Abert's "curious volte-face" was perfectly expressed in a single sentence written in 1913 by Edward J. Dent: "Leopold Mozart, although always held up to admiration as the most devoted of fathers, has a very repellant side to his character" (Mozart's Operas: A Critical Study, 2d ed. [London: Oxford University Press, 1960], 14). From Dent on, negative appraisals of Leopold's character remained the norm throughout the twentieth century, reaching an extreme in Maynard Solomon's psycho-biography of the son with its references to Leopold's "erotically tinged drive to dominate," his "irrational moments," and "the depth of his delusions." (Mozart: A Life [New York: Harper Collins, 1995], 11, 214, and 215). Of course, such negativity is partly a result of regarding Leopold only in the context of Wolfgang's life and career. To see any father through the eyes of a son trying to break free of the family is to see the "irrational moments" and the "repellant side of his character." But Leopold was not only Wolfgang's father; he was a musician of talent, an accomplished teacher, and the author of one of the most important pedagogical treatises of the eighteenth century, the Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule. Thus it is a welcome development that more scholarship has been devoted to [End Page 61] Leopold himself in recent decades, and it may not be a coincidence that a more balanced appraisal of his character has emerged at the same time, notably in Ruth Halliwell's The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Cliff Eisen is one of the scholars who have devoted serious study to Leopold's life and works, from his 1986 dissertation on the symphonies ("The Symphonies of Leopold Mozart and their Relationship to the Early Symphonies of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Bibliographical and Stylistic Study" [Ph.D. diss., Cornell University]) to more recent research and published articles (see the bibliography on p. 257 of the volume under review). As a summation of his work to date, Eisen has prepared a well...

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.

History of individuals of the 18th/19th centuries stored in bones, teeth, and hair analyzed by LA–ICP–MS—a step in attempts to confirm the authenticity of Mozart’s skull

A cranium stored in the Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg/Austria which is believed to be that of Mozart, and skeletal remains of suspected relatives which have been excavated from the Mozart family grave in the cemetery in Salzburg, have been subjected to scientific investigations to determine whether or not the skull is authentic. A film project by the Austrian television ORF in collaboration with Interspot Film on this issue was broadcast at the beginning of the "Mozart year 2006". DNA analysis could not clarify relationships among the remains and, therefore, assignment of the samples was not really possible. In our work this skull and excavated skeletal remains have been quantified for Pb, Cr, Hg, As, and Sb content by laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to obtain information about the living conditions of these individuals. A small splinter of enamel (less than 1 mm(3)) from a tooth of the "Mozart cranium" was also available for investigation. Quantification was performed by using spiked hydroxyapatite standards. Single hair samples which are recorded to originate from Mozart have also been investigated by LA-ICP-MS and compared with hair samples of contemporary citizens stored in the Federal Pathologic-Anatomical Museum, Vienna. In general, Pb concentrations up to approximately 16 mug g(-1) were found in the bone samples of 18th century individuals (a factor of 7 to 8 higher than in recent samples) reflecting elevated Pb levels in food or beverages. Elevated Pb levels were also found in hair samples. The amount of Sb in the enamel sample of the "Mozart cranium" (approx. 3 mug g(-1)) was significantly higher than in all the other tooth samples investigated, indicating possible Sb ingestion in early childhood. Elevated concentrations of elements in single hair samples gave additional information about possible exposure of the individuals to heavy metals at a particular point in their life.

Mozart: The Early Years, 1756-1781 (review)

Reviewed by: Mozart: The Early Years, 1756–1781 Jane R. Stevens Mozart: The Early Years, 1756–1781. By Stanley Sadie. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. [xxv, 624 p. ISBN 0-393-06112-4. $35.00.] Illustrations, bibliography, indexes. Shortly before his death in March 2005, Stanley Sadie completed the manuscript of the first volume of a long planned two-volume work about Mozart and his music. Sadie was surely correct in perceiving a need for a comprehensive monograph on Mozart's life and works that would take account of over half a century of scholarly studies, both biographical and musical, that have transformed many of our ideas about this most "classical" of composers. Few, moreover, would question this scholar's credentials for such an undertaking, building as it does on decades of research, best known from his New Grove article and other work on Mozart. Yet this is not a project for the faint of heart. Much has changed since the early-twentieth-century canonic work of Hermann Abert, Théodore Wyzewa, and Georges de Saint-Foix: not only has our knowledge of relevant and often essential minutiae vastly increased, from paper and handwriting dating to the identities and lives of countless contemporaries who contributed to Mozart's world; but our most basic views of eighteenth-century music history and of the ways that composers contributed to it have lost their straightforward clarity in favor of an often rather murky complexity. While such considerations only underline the need for this new monograph, at the same time they contribute to the formidable difficulties it faced and to its unavoidable susceptibility to criticism on a multitude of fronts, especially in its present truncated form. Happily, the skill with which Sadie met these difficulties will ensure that his book will become an essential staple of any scholarly library, despite its equally sure fate as a continuing object of scholarly critique. [End Page 588] The plan of this volume, like much else about it, is rather traditional—meaning it is a plan that has served the needs of a great many writers and readers in the past. In twenty chapters, beginning with Mozart's family history and concluding with the composition of Idomeneo, we move through the largely familiar chronological periods of Mozart's first twenty-five years, each characterized by a title that often serves to give direction to the narrative (e.g., "Disappointment in Vienna" [1767–1769], "Frustration" [1775–1777]). The first and usually longer part of each chapter is devoted to detailed biography, including Mozart's composing activity; in most cases this narration is followed by a discussion of the principal works of the period, with attention both to issues of sources and authenticity (where relevant), and to musical commentary. Like all biographies of Mozart, this one must rely for information about these early years on the voluminous correspondence written by and to family members, largely during periods when the young musician was away from his Salzburg home. But Sadie is sometimes able to augment these accounts with those of outsiders commenting on the family's activities. In early chapters, the attention given to the practical details of travel, with sometimes numbing listings of names of inns and people encountered along the way, can lead to reader ennui; one wishes for a map on which one could trace the Mozarts' routes for a vicarious (or actual) tourist expedition. Yet these details serve in themselves to evoke Leopold's own very real concerns during these journeys—how would he get his family safely and comfortably to the next major destination, how much would it cost, would they be able to make enough money in appearances to make up those expenses?—as well as the arbitrariness of their compensation, over which they had no control. As Wolfgang grew older, Leopold's continued preoccupation with these concerns has appeared to modern historians to be increasingly inappropriate (as it certainly was to his son). Ever since the early years of the nineteenth century, Mozart's biographers have been fascinated by his personality, what we might call his psychological makeup. The twentieth century added another element, the psyche of the father and especially...

Mozart--portrait and myth

On 27 January 2006 we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, considered by many to be the greatest musical genius that the world has ever known. His life has been chronicled in more detail than any other musician and there are extant about 1200 letters in the Mozart family correspondence that give first-hand information about much of the composer's life. Paradoxically, however, in spite of this wealth of material which is repeatedly being re-assessed, the circumstances of his health and death continue to abound in myth. The main reason for this anomaly lies in the failure of many authors to take cognizance of the primary sources of information, such as the family letters; instead, they cite the numerous secondary sources, which have accumulated over the years to which are added speculative opinions masquerading as fact. Soon after his death stories began to circulate that he had succumbed to poison administered by his rival Salieri or, according to some, the Freemasons. The poisoning tales have now been laid to rest but many other fables grew up particularly those concerned with his medical history and death some of which show remarkable persistence.

The Enigma of Absolute Pitch

Figure 1. The pitch class circle. The notes of the traditional Western musical scale are produced by dividing the octave into 12 semitone steps. A semitone is the pitch relation formed by two adjacent notes on a keyboard, and corresponds to a frequency ratio of approximately 18:17. Each of the twelve notes within the octave is assigned a name: C, C#, D; D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, and B. The entire scale is generated by repeating this series of note names (or ‘pitch classes’) across octaves. When people with absolute pitch identify notes by name, they are identifying the positions of the tones along the pitch class circle. Introduction In the summer of 1763, the Mozart family embarked on the famous tour of Europe that established the young composer’s reputation as a musical prodigy. Just before they left, an anonymous letter appeared in the Augsburgischer Intelligenz-Zettel describing seven year old Wolfgang’s extraordinary abilities. The letter included the following:

The Cambridge Companion to Mozart (review)

Cambridge Companion to Mozart. Edited by Simon P. Keefe. (Cambridge Companions to Music.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [xvii, 272 p. ISBN 0-521-80734-4. $70 (hbk.); ISBN 0-521-00192-7. $26 (pbk.).] Music examples, facsimiles, bibliography, indexes. Cambridge Copanion to examines the and his music from variety of perspectives. Seventeen complementary essays address the contexts in which lived and worked, the music itself and its reception, and issues of performance. Intended for students and scholar, as well as general readers, the book aims to bridge the gap between scholarly and popular images of the composer through presenting up-to-date (p. 2). Practically all the volume's essays do indeed challenge popular conceptions of and his music. opening chapters on context tackle one of the more persistent falsehoods: the belief that the was neglected and mistreated during his lifetime. Chapter 1, written by Cliff Eisen, discusses musical life in Salzburg during Mozart's tenure there. He concludes that the city was hardly musical backwater (p. 13) and while Archbishop Colloredo was undoubtedly a difficult employer . . . the Mozarts [father and son] were not good employees (pp. 19-20). He further argues that the Mozarts deliberately provoked the Archbishop by flagrantly ignoring certain compositional and professional expectations; therefore they were partly, if not mostly, responsible for their supposed mistreatment. Similarly Dorothea Link's essay on Vienna challenges the myth that the Viennese court ignored and that the composer's last decade was largely unsuccessful. Although experienced some lean years near the end of his life, she demonstrates that he actively pursued and achieved some success in all the professional avenues open to him, including winning desirable court appointment. Two chapters deconstruct the image of as childlike genius who was out of touch with the world. In Mozart and Late Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, David Schroeder draws on Mozart's family correspondence and other evidence to prove the was keenly aware of the era's philosophical, political, and aesthetic trends (p. 48). William Stafford's discussion of The Evolution of Mozartian Biography clearly explains why the early biographies incorporated fictions and placed undue emphasis on . . . [Mozart's] wondrous childhood (p. 203). After laying this foundation, Stafford then discusses prominent themes in biographies of the composer, using them in part to trace how concepts of genius have transformed over time. Both essays suggest that popular images of the unfairly downplay the element of skill and craft in Mozart's music (p. 208) as well as the influence of his environment. Challenging long-held assumptions also extends to the chapters on music. Although Die Zauberflote, for instance, is often assumed to be without precedent, David Buch shows that it stems from fashion for fairy tale operas. As Buch notes, most scholarship has focused on allegorical interpretations of the opera. Wisely he does not address these in detail, but focuses instead on placing the opera in its theatrical context. His research leads him to reject basic premise about the work: because fairy talc operas prior to and following Die Zauberflote have no demonstrable [allegorical] content, according to Buch, he questions whether or not Die Zauberflote is in fact an allegory, stance that will surely raise some eyebrows (p. 166). Other essays in the collection also question prevailing assumptions and discuss how views of and his output have changed over time. Today most listeners consider the composer's music to epitomize beauty and elegance, but to his contemporaries it seemed congested, even rough [and] bizarre (p. 176). David Levin's essay on performance practice builds upon this point. While many strive for serene, legato surface when performing Mozart, Levin argues passionately that frequent changes in texture, articulation, harmony, and topoi are fundamental to Mozart's music; performers, therefore, should exploit this volatility of character (p. …

Mozart's piano concertos

Mozart's piano concertos stand alongside his operas and symphonies as his most frequently performed and best loved music. They have attracted the attention of generations of musicologists who have explored their manifold meanings from a variety of viewpoints. In this study, John Irving brings together the various strands of scholarship surrounding Mozart's concertos including analytical approaches, aspects of performance practice and issues of compositional genesis based on investigation of manuscript and early printed editions. Treating the concertos collectively as a repertoire, rather than as individual works, the first section of the book tackles broad thematic issues such as the role of the piano concerto in Mozart's quasi-freelance life in late eighteenth-century Vienna, the origin of his concertos in earlier traditions of concerto writing; eighteenth-century theoretical frameworks for the understanding of movement forms, subsequent historical shifts in the perception of the concerto's form, listening strategies and performance practices. This is followed by a 'documentary register' which proceeds through all 23 original works, drawing together information on the source materials. Accounts of the concertos' compositional genesis, early performance history and reception are also included here, drawing extensively on the Mozart family correspondence and other contemporary reports. Drawing together and synthesizing this wealth of material, Irving provides an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with this repertoire.

The Mozart family: four lives in a social context

The Mozart family: four lives in a social context

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

Haydn and Mozart's 1773 Stay in Vienna: Weeding a Musicological Garden

Research Article| April 01 1992 Haydn and Mozart's 1773 Stay in Vienna: Weeding a Musicological Garden A. Peter Brown A. Peter Brown Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1992) 10 (2): 192–230. https://doi.org/10.2307/763612 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation A. Peter Brown; Haydn and Mozart's 1773 Stay in Vienna: Weeding a Musicological Garden. Journal of Musicology 1 April 1992; 10 (2): 192–230. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/763612 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of Musicology Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1992 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.