Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships ...with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and Così still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.
"Most people today think of Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the only Bach and Mozart of classical music. This volume in the Bach Perspectives series offers essays on the ...lesser-known musical figures who share those illustrious names alongside new research on the legendary composers themselves. Topics include the keyboard transcriptions of J. S. Bach and Johann Gottfried Walther; J. S. Bach and W. A. Mozart's freelance work; the sonatas of C. P. E. Bach and Leopold Mozart; the early musical training given J. C. Bach by his father and half-brother; the surprising musical similarities between J. C. Bach and W. A. Mozart; and the latest documentary research on Mozart's 1789 visit to the Thomasschule in Leipzig. An official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives, Volume 14 draws on a variety of approaches and a broad range of subject matter in presenting a new wave of innovative classical musical sch
Internationally renowned scholars and performers present a wide range of new analytical, historical and critical perspectives on some of Mozart's most popular chamber music: his sonatas with violin, ...keyboard trios and quartets and the quintet with wind instruments. The chapters trace a broad chronology, from the childhood works, to the Mannheim and Paris sonatas with keyboard and violin, and the mature compositions from his Vienna years. Drawing upon the most recent research, this study serves the reader, be they a performer, listener or scholar, with a collection of writings that demonstrate the composer's innovative developments to generic archetypes and which explore and assess Mozart's creative response to the opportunities afforded by new and diverse instrumental combinations. Manners of performance of this music far removed from our own are revealed, with concluding chapters considering historically informed practice and the challenges for modern performers and audiences.
In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later ...eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview. Until this historical moment, as Berger illustrates in his analysis of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, music was simply "in time." Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. But after the shift, as he finds in looking at Mozart's Don Giovanni, the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger complements these musical case studies with a rich survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period.
The Italian opera company in Prague managed by Pasquale Bondini and Domenico Guardasoni played a central role in promoting Mozart's operas during the final years of his life. Using a wide range of ...primary sources which include the superb collections of eighteenth-century opera posters and concert programmes in Leipzig and the Indice de' teatrali spettacoli, an almanac of Italian singers and dancers, this study examines the annual schedules, recruitment networks, casting policies and repertoire selections of this important company. Woodfield shows how Italian-language performances of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and La clemenza di Tito flourished along the well-known cultural axis linking Prague in Bohemia to Dresden and Leipzig in Saxony. The important part played by concert performances of operatic arias in the early reception of Mozart's works is also discussed and new information is presented about the reception of Josepha Duschek and Mozart in Leipzig.
Presenting a fresh interpretation of Mozart's Requiem, Simon P. Keefe redresses a longstanding scholarly imbalance whereby narrow consideration of the text of this famously incomplete work has taken ...precedence over consideration of context in the widest sense. Keefe details the reception of the Requiem legend in general writings, fiction, theatre and film, as well as discussing criticism, scholarship and performance. Evaluation of Mozart's work on the Requiem turns attention to the autograph score, the document in which myths and musical realities collide. Franz Xaver Süssmayr's completion (1791–2) is also re-appraised and the ideological underpinnings of modern completions assessed. Overall, the book affirms that Mozart's Requiem, fascinating for interacting musical, biographical, circumstantial and psychological reasons, cannot be fully appreciated by studying only Mozart's activities. Broad-ranging hermeneutic approaches to the work, moreover, supersede traditionally limited discursive confines.
Today, the names Bach and Mozart are mostly associated with Johann
Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But this volume of
Bach Perspectives offers essays on the lesser-known
musical figures ...who share those illustrious names alongside new
research on the legendary composers themselves. Topics include the
keyboard transcriptions of J. S. Bach and Johann Gottfried Walther;
J. S. Bach and W. A. Mozart's freelance work; the sonatas of C. P.
E. Bach and Leopold Mozart; the early musical training given J. C.
Bach by his father and half-brother; the surprising musical
similarities between J. C. Bach and W. A. Mozart; and the latest
documentary research on Mozart's 1789 visit to the Thomasschule in
Leipzig.
An official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach
Perspectives, Volume 14 draws on a variety of approaches and a
broad range of subject matter in presenting a new wave of
innovative classical musical scholarship.
Contributors: Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Yoel Greenberg, Noelle M.
Heber, Michael Maul, Stephen Roe, and David Schulenberg
Mozart in the East Cecilia Conte
Ricognizioni,
12/2023, Volume:
10, Issue:
20
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The aim of this paper is to highlight an aspect of Mozart's production that has long been neglected by contemporary musicology: the strong influence of Orientalism in some of the composer's works. ...After a brief focus on musical antecedents related to Orientalism, mostly composed in France, Austria and Germany, we will then examine four of Mozart's most famous works in more detail: the Violin Concerto in A major K219, the Piano Sonata in A major K331 and the two renowned Singspiele: Die Entführung aus dem Serail K384 and Die Zauberflöte K620. For each of these works, all of them replete with Turqueries and exotic elements, different aspects will be examined with the aim of providing a multifaceted review of the main manifestations of Orientalism in European musical production of the 18th century. It is worth clarifying that what will be examined constitutes the original core of a series of elements that, in Art music production of the following centuries, will become a compositional norm with explicit reference to the Middle East, although derived from cultural and musical stereotypes. Furthermore, when discussing the East in a musical context, we do not refer to well-defined geographical and cultural boundaries. In this paper, we will also offer a brief analysis of this highly stereotyped and antithetical Eastern world, from a perspective strictly linked to the musical context, but one whose influences also partially extend to literature and visual arts.
