In mozarts words

7/27/2019 In mozarts words

1/8

I N M O Z A R T S W O R D S :

P E R S P E C T I V E S O N A N E W ,

O N L I N E E D I T I O N O F T H E

M O Z A R T F A M I L Y L E T T E R S

F R O M I T A L Y , 1 7 7 0 1 7 7 3

Cliff Eisen1

English Abstract

A new database of Mozarts Italian letters promises both research and pedagogical benefits. With

respect to research, it not only represents a updating of the now-obsolete commentary upon which

much traditional Mozart research is based but also the possibility to draw connections between and

among letters that until now have been difficult to grasp in their entirety. These connections can give

rise to new or refined ideas concerning performance and social context, among others. And because

the annotations require a consideration of aspects of Mozart not traditionally thought to be of much

importance, such as physical objects, they may also promote new critical paradigms, such as mate-

rial culture. Accordingly, this article explores the philosophical rationale behind the edition and

its annotations. As for pedagogical benefits, the resource not only permits easy access to thematerial now available for the first time, complete, in four major languages hence facilitating stu-

dent research, but the very act of learning to use the database effectively by nature teaches research

skills by asking students to confront how, and how accurately, the project has been executed. It also

benefits students, and for that matter researchers as well, by representing an infinitely-expandable

pilot project in the more general field of digital humanities.

French Abstract

Une nouvelle base de donnes qui contient les lettres italiennes de Mozart promet des avantages

dans les domaines de la recherche et de la pdagogie. Sur le plan scientifique, cette base de donnes

contient dune part une mise jour des commentaires actuellement obsoltes, sur lesquels une

grande quantit de la recherche traditionelle sur Mozart est base. Dautre part, elle offre la

possibilit dtablir des liens entre des lettres, qui, jusqu maintenant, taient difficiles manier

dans leur totalit. Ces relations peuvent faire apparatre des ides nouvelles ou pures concernant,

entre autres, linterprtation et le contexte social. Les annotations traitent galement d aspects sur

Mozart, qui traditionellement ne sont pas examins comme trs importants, comme des objets

physiques ; par consquence, ces considrations peuvent stimuler de nouveaux paradigmes

critiques, par exemple concernant la culture matrielle.

Cet article examine ensuite le principe fondamental et philosophique, sur lequel cette dition et

ses annotations sont bases. En ce qui concerne les avantages pdagogiques, les ressources

permettent un accs simple, et pour la premire fois, linformation complte est accessible en quatre

langues, ce qui, par consquence, facilite la recherche des tudiants.

1 Cliff Eisen is professor of music history at Kings College London This paper was read at the 2010 IAML


2/8

2 F O N T E S A R T I S M U S I C A E 5 8 / 1

Effectivement, lutilisation de cette base de donnes dune manire naturelle favorise mme un

apprentissage et dveloppe des aptitudes de recherche par la confrontation de la manire et du

niveau dexactitude de ce projet.Un autre avantage de ce projet pilote, pour des tudiants et galement pour des chercheurs, est

son expansion infinie dans le domaine gnral des sciences humaines numriques.

German Abstract

Eine neue Datenbank mit Mozarts italienischen Briefen verspricht Vorteile sowohl fr die

Forschung als auch fr die Pdagogik. Aus Forschungssicht beinhaltet diese nicht nur eine

Aktualisierung inzwischen berholter Kommentare, auf die sich ltere Mozartforschung bezieht,

sondern auch die Mglichkeit Verbindungen zwischen Briefen zu ziehen, die bisher nicht

vollstndig verfgbar waren. Diese Verbindungen knnen zu neuen oder berarbeiteten Thesen zu

Auffhrungspraxis, sozialem Hintergr und etc. verhelfen. Und da die Kommentierung die

Bercksichtigung von blicherweise als eher unwichtig erachteten Aspekten Mozarts verlangt(z.B. physische Gegenstnde), kann sie neue entscheidende Denkmuster in dieser Richtung

frdern. Dementsprechend behandelt dieser Aufsatz das philosophische Grundprinzip hinter der

Ausgabe und ihrer Kommentierung. Was den pdagogischen Gewinn betrifft, so bietet diese Quelle

nicht nur einen einfachen Zugang zum Material, das nunmehr erstmalig komplett, in vier Sprachen

vorliegt, und somit studentische Forschung ermglicht. Sondern durch die fundierte Beschftigung

mit der Datenbanknutzung, lernen die Studenten Recherchestrategien und befassen sich

gleichzeitig dabei mit der Frage, auf welche Weise das Projekt erarbeitet und wie genau es ausge -

fhrt wurde. Das Projekt selbst stellt ein beliebig erweiterbares Pilotprojekt im weiten Feld der

digitalen Geisteswissenschaften dar und ist damit Studenten genauso wie Forschern von Nutzen.

The Mozart family letters rank among the most extensive and informative sur viving cor-respondence from the eighteenth century, musical or otherwise. They are important not

only for what they say about the composers life and works but also for an understanding,whether from the Mozarts perspective or ours, of contemporaneous politics, manners,and social cultures beyond the biographical and musical, they are early social anthro-

pology documents, especially the letters written on the Grand Tour of 17631766 and theletters from the Mozarts time in Italy, between 1770 and 1773.

Not surprisingly, the letters have a long, complex, and sometimes distinguished edito-rial history. A substantial selection was published as early as 1828 by Constanze Mozarts

second husband, the Danish diplomat Georg Nikolaus Nissen, in his BiographieW. A. Mozarts, while the first comprehensive edition was Ludwig NohlsMozarts Briefe of1865. Later editions, by Karl Stork (1906), Albert Leitzmann (1910), Hans Mersmann(1911), and Hugo Leichtentritt (1912) were based on Nohl. Substantially more complete

was Ludwig Schiedermairs four-volume edition of 1914, which for many years was thestandard German-language edition of the correspondence.

The first complete edition in English, based on Schiedermair and today still the stan-dard translation, appeared in 1938: Emily Andersons The Letters of Mozart and his Family.

Anderson has been revised twice: by A. Hyatt King and Monica Carolan in 1966, and by

Stanley Sadie and Fiona Smart in 1985. The three editions differ considerably. Letters

from Constanze Mozart to the Offenbach publisher Johann Anton Andr, chiefly con-cerning the sale of Mozar ts musical estate, were included in the first edition, but omitted

from the second and third editions. The third edition, on the other hand, added some pas-


3/8

none of these editions is really complete. Most importantly, a decision was made early onto reproduce Leopold Mozarts voluminous correspondence only in extract. In fact,

Andersons main purpose was not to provide a complete collection of the letters of Mozart

and his family but, rather, only a complete collection of all the extant letters of Mozart.2

There is, as yet, no Italian edition of the letters, although one is in the works. But there

is a more-or-less complete French edition, in an idiomatic and sophisticated translation byGenevive Geffray, with a commentary based in large part, though not exclusively, on

what is now the standard German-language edition letters, by Wilhelm A. Bauer, Otto

Erich Deutsch, Joseph-Heinz Eibl, and Ulrich Konrad, published as part of the NeueMozart-Ausgabe (Kassel: Brenreiter: 19622005).

The great achievement of the Bauer-Deutsch edition, as it is commonly known, was not

only to present the letters complete, but also, in doing so, to open the door to new and

more sophisticated readings of the letters, readings that lie at the hear t of present-day con-textualizing studies of Mozart. To all intents and purposes, the Bauer-Deutsch edition hasdone its job, to stimulate new research and new ways of thinking about Mozart. 3 But thisinevitably means it needs to be rethought and revised in light of the new perspectives it

itself generated. In any case, the edition is now more than thirty-five years old and it isclear, both from Mozart scholarship since the mid-1970s and from eighteenth-century

scholarship generally, that a thorough-going revision is both desirable and necessary.It is not just a question of updating and correcting, however. It is also a question of

examining the critical principles that motivate, or motivated, the Anderson, the Bauer-

Deutsch, or for that matter any other particular edition. For lurking behind both theAnderson edition in its selectivity and the Bauer-Deutsch edition in the brevity of itscommentary with respect to political, social, and cultural trends; the mechanics of travel;

and even the numerous and important everyday objects mentioned in the letters, to nameonly a few is the long-standing biographical tradition that Mozart was fundamentally a

genius-in-isolation, largely untouched (except in negative ways) by the world aroundhim. Accordingly, it is only what Wolfgang says, or only passages about music, that havebeen subject to any sort of penetrating analysis. The Anderson edition makes this bias

abundantly clear. In the introduction to the first edition the publisher offers a justificationfor Andersons selectivity: Miss Andersons omissions rarely if ever concern any passagereferring to music, musicians, performances or indeed Mozart himself; the omitted ma-

terial generally treats of practical or trivial matters such as details of journeys, weather, ail-

ments and news of or greetings from acquaintances.4The same idea appears to animatethe Bauer-Deutsch edition, though implicitly. Since it is complete, there is no question of

justifying omissions. But the commentary singularly fails to address in any serious, criti-cal way questions of travel, medicine, current events, fashion and politics, among many

others.Some of the deficiencies of earlier editions are entirely understandable: a failure to

know what at the time was not known, or even could not have been known such as thebirth and death dates or even the identities of many of the people mentioned in the

O N L I N E E D I T I O N O F M O Z A R T F A M I L Y L E T T E R S F R O M I T A L Y , 1 7 7 0 1 7 7 3 3

2. Emily Anderson, ed., The Letters of Mozart and his Family, third edition, ed. Stanley Sadie and Fiona Smart

(London, 1985), xv and xvi-xviii.

3. To cite only two recent examples, see David Schroeder,Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief,and Deception (New Haven and London, 1999); and Matthew Head, Myths of a Sinful Father: Maynard

Solomons Mozart Music & Letters 80 (1999) 7485


4/8


5. Anthony Pryer, Mozarts operatic audition. The Milan concert, 12 March 1770: a reappraisal and revision,

Eighteenth-Century Music 1/2 (2004), 265288.

6. Cliff Eisen, New Light on Mozarts Linz Symphony, K. 425, Journal of the Royal Musical Association113 (1988), 8196. At the time the NMA edition was published (1971), both the source and the letters were

known yet no connection was made between them. In the edition, it was first made in a revised critical report

family letters is no failure at all. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to continue researchand to correct the historical record. At the same time, however, there are ways that theletters have been presented whether due to the limitations of print or a conscious deci-

sion how to organize the material that to my mind might be reconsidered in an onlineedition. In particular I refer to the segregation of different types of sources: letters, docu-

ments, iconography, and musical sources, each of which has traditionally had its own sep-arate repository the letters in Bauer-Deutsch, the documents in Otto Erich Deutschs

Mozart. Die Dokumente seines Lebens (1961) and its supplements, the iconography in

DeutschsMozart und seine Welt in zeitgenssischen Bilder(1961), and the musical sourcesin the critical reports of theNeue Mozart-Ausgabe. What an online edition permits is the

presentation of all relevant types of sources in one place. And in doing so, it encouragesa reevaluation of those sources, their relationships to each other, and their interpretation.

So, for example, with respect to Mozarts works, Anthony Pryer, through a careful read-ing of the letters, contemporaneous documents, contexts, and musical sources was able toargue convincingly I think that the traditional idea that Mozart had the arias K.73A,77 and 88 performed at his Milan concert on 12 March 1770, needs to be reevaluated, and

that K.71 and 83 are more likely possibilities.5 Similarly, it is possible to draw connectionsamong Mozarts and Leopolds letters of 15 May and 15 September 1784 and the physical

and scribal details of a manuscript copy of the Linz symphony, K.425, to help establishnot only that the source is authentic but also, possibly, the only surviving source to derivefrom the now-lost autograph. This profoundly affects the text and, accordingly, perfor-

mance and analysis of the symphony.6 Such connections and observations are consider-ably easier to make when all sources are given in one place, as is possible in an onlineedition, with its nearly limitless possibilities for linking material, to say nothing of tech-

nologies that actively seek out previously unimagined connections (see Patrizia Rebullaspaper below).

To put the matter methodologically and philosophically, an online edition of the sort wepropose is based in no small part on the conviction that a source is a source, no matter

what form it takes letter, document, manuscript, picture and that categorizing dif fer-

ent types of sources discretely, as being fundamentally different, has at times inhibitedscholarly research. The same might be said of broader cultural issues which, as I have

noted, have traditionally taken a back seat to the specifically biographical and musicalcontent of the letters. Presenting the letters online, however, and in a context that tries to

draw together different types of sources, brings to the fore issues beyond the biographi-cal and musical. Even a cursory trawl through the letters from London points up the enor-mously different types of people, places, and ideas Mozart was exposed to and that tomy mind we risk losing as part of Mozart if we do not address them. In London, the

Mozarts not only met the royal family and the nobility and gave concerts and composedworks this is the usual important information taken from the London letters to the ex-

clusion of other types of information but also the family observed and made note oflocal working and eating habits, purchased scientific equipment and medical supplies


5/8

(including telescopes and sticking plaster), dealt extensively with publishers and instru-ment makers, bought clothing and household goods (including hats, jackets and cork-screws), had their portraits painted, learned the workings of local newspapers in order

to advertise themselves, purchased books and topographical engravings (see Figure 1),went to coffee houses, and tried to accustom themselves to local beer. The Mozarts

world Wolfgangs educational environment was not simply one of music, music-making, and patronage. Rather, it included virtually every aspect of the physical, intellec-tual, and cultural world around him: surely Leopolds interest in optical equipment and in

the latest scientific findings, to take only one example, was at least in part behind Mozartslater visit to the famous Mannheim observatory on 16 October 1778 (see Figure 2)7 andhis interest in Jean-Pierre Blanchards 1791 balloon flights in Vienna8 (this last in particu-

lar had a well-known musical ramification: the descent in a balloon of the three boys inDie

Zauberflte). At least as much space in the letters is devoted to matters like these as tomusic if not more.

FIGURE 1 Royal Hospital, Chelsea. Engraving, London c1764 (example owned by the Mozarts,

now A-Sca).


7. See Kai Budde, Sterne, Blitze, Luftballen. Astronomie und Physik in Mannheim zur Zeit Mozarts in Karin

v. Welck and Liselotte Homering, eds., 176 Tage W. A. Mozart in Mannheim (Mannheim, 1991), 112127.


6/8

FIGURE 2 Mannheim Observatory. Engraving, London, J. Gardnor, 1788.

It is with respect to the wider cultural universe of the eighteenth-century in particularthat an online edition of the Mozart family letters might fundamentally alter the ways we

think about the composer. Aside from giving the letters complete in four-languages, an on-line edition promises to at least try to represent the broader context within which Mozartlived and worked, a context that will inevitably affect our understanding of his works and

how we write about them. The pedagogical uses therefore seem clear: in addition to pro-viding a fundamental resource and body of basic information, such a site would encour-age students to investigate questions beyond the purely disciplinary, or at the very least

from angles not previously thought of.It is implicit in this idea and possible in part because, as an online resource, the edi-

tion is renewable and revisable, unlike a print edition that it might also serve as a plat-

form for investigating and reformulating interdisciplinary, partly-traditional and partly-technology-based humanities research generally: its basis in source material of all sorts,

including manuscripts and printed material, archival documents, paintings, engravings,correspondences, maps, fashion, and everyday objects owned or encountered by the



7/8

future of interdisciplinary humanistic studies. Accordingly, In Mozarts Words whichfor the moment is limited to the letters written from Italy between 1769 and 1773 represents only the first stage in a broader inquiry, one that, given its marriage of histor-

ical and cultural research and humanities computing, can be broadly applied to the hu-manities generally, in any particular field, and from any particular starting point. In the

case of Mozart, the next steps would be to consider the Grand Tour (17631766), Mozartat home in Salzburg (mostly 17701780), and Mozart at home in Vienna (17811791). Theend result could be a thoroughly interdisciplinary and comprehensive account of Mozart

in his time and place, one that appeals to and intersects with other humanistic disciplinesand other studies of roughly the same time period providing, among other things, a repos-itory of names, places, and, generally speaking, data relating to the eighteenth-century.

Not only in this specific respect but also more generally with respect to its broader con-

ception, it represents a model that is transferable to humanistic studies on the whole: itcould be used with any other composer, artist, writer or scientist, it could begin with anygeographical location or court or other institution, or it could start from any particularhistorical concept or physical object. Regardless of its starting point, the end goals are

roughly the same in welding together different historical strands and providing both anew means of inquiry and a new way of presenting cultural-historical research. Given the

nature and architecture of the framework, projects independently conceived along similarlines could easily be linked, cross-referenced and integrated with each other and eventu-ally be used to build up a broader picture of later eighteenth-century culture together with

new historical paradigms.



8/8

Copyright of Fontes Artis Musicae is the property of International Association of Music Libraries and its

content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's

express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

In mozarts words

Documents

Transcript of In mozarts words