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.
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.
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.
The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone ...Luigi Bassi (1766–1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his portrayal has never been studied in depth before, and this book presents a large number of new sources (first- and second-hand accounts), which allows us to reconstruct his performance scene by scene. The book confronts Bassi’s portrayal with a study of the opera’s early German reception and performance history, demonstrating how Don Giovanni as we know it today was not only created by Mozart, Da Ponte and Luigi Bassi but also by the early German adapters, translators, critics and performers who turned the title character into the arrogant and violent villain we still encounter in most of today’s stage productions. Incorporating discussion of dramaturgical thinking of the late Enlightenment and the difficult moral problems that the opera raises, this is an important study for scholars and researchers from opera studies, theatre and performance studies, music history as well as conductors, directors and singers.
It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At ...the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? InMozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace.
Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.
Integrating Schenkerian tools and an innovative approach to harmony, David Damschroder provides numerous penetrating analyses of works by Haydn and Mozart. A series of introductory chapters assist ...readers in developing their analytical capacity. Beginning with short excerpts from string quartets, the study proceeds by assessing the inner workings of twelve expositions from Haydn piano sonatas, six arias in G minor from Mozart operas, and three rondos in D major from piano concertos by Haydn and Mozart. In the Masterworks section that follows, Damschroder presents detailed analyses of six movements from symphonies, string quartets and opera by Haydn and Mozart, and compares his outcomes with those of other analysts, including Kofi Agawu, Robert O. Gjerdingen, James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Carl Schachter and James Webster. The book represents an important contribution to modern analytical discourse on a treasured body of music and an assessment of recent accomplishments within that realm.
ABSTRACT
The article discusses aspects of the dialectics of genius cults in the nineteenth century, using examples of Mozart's reception: the unveiling of the Salzburg memorial statue in 1842, Franz ...Grillparzer's texts on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his son Franz Xaver, as well as the artist's novella Der arme Spielmann. The consolidation and popularisation of genius discourse in the genius cults of post‐Romanticism exerted unprecedented if latent pressure on producers of art in the period: the cults around prominent figures make great art into an unattainable exception. The article investigates how Franz Xaver Mozart and Grillparzer reacted to this dilemma.
Resumen
Der Beitrag diskutiert Aspekte der Dialektik des Geniekults im neunzehnten Jahrhundert am Beispiel der Mozartrezeption: der Enthüllung des Salzburger Mozart‐Denkmals von 1842, Franz Grillparzers Texten zu Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart und dessen Sohn Franz Xaver sowie an der Künstlernovelle Der arme Spielmann. Die Durchsetzung und Popularisierung des Geniediskurses zum Geniekult in der Nachromantik führt zu einer latenten Überforderung der Kunstproduzierenden: Der Kult um die Ausnahmekünstler macht die große Kunstleistung zur unerreichbaren Ausnahme. Der Beitrag untersucht, wie Franz Xaver Mozart und Grillparzer mit diesem Dilemma umgehen.
A bold, restorative vision of Mozart's works, and Western art music generally, as manifestations of an idealism rooted in the sociable nature of humans. For over a generation now, many leading ...performers, critics, and scholars of Mozart's music have taken a rejection of transcendence as axiomatic. This essentially modernist, antiromantic orientation attempts to neutralize the sorts of aesthetic experiences that presuppose an enchantment with Mozart's art, an engagement traditionally articulated by such terms as intention, mimesis, author, and genius. And what is true of much recent Mozart interpretation isoften manifest in the interpretation of Western art music more generally. Edmund Goehring's Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past explores what gets lost when the vocabulary of enchantment is abandoned. The bookthen proceeds to offer an alternative vision of Mozart's works and of the wider canon of Western art music. A modernized poetics, Goehring argues, reduces art to mechanism or process. It sees less because it excludes a necessaryand enlarging human presence: the generative, and receiving, "I." This fascinating new book-length essay is addressed to any reader interested in the performing arts, visual arts, and literature and their relationship to the broader culture. Goehring draws on seminal thinkers in art criticism and philosophy to propose that such works as Mozart's radiate an idealism that has human sociability both as its source and its object. This book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC.
The paper Lending an Ear to Mozart's Operas. Stanisław Baranczak's Poetic Translation Experiments examines the issues of intermediality, in particular the relationships between music and literature ...in mixed creative genres fusing disparate media of expression. The brief study discusses the connections and inter-dependencies between the music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Italian libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte, their translation by Stanisław Barańczak and his unique quasi-translation ('fonety'). The article presents interdisciplinary interpretations of selected vocal translations (excerpts from the libretti of 'Don Giovanni' and 'The Marriage of Figaro') and 'fonety' - Barańczak's own genre created at the boundary where linguistic witticisms and vocal translation meet. The Italian text by Da Ponte is often treated as quasi una musica - as a sound material free from the referential ballast of language (semantics). Barańczak offers the music lover a new means of aural reception in the buffo style, illuminating a path to discovering anew the artistic potential of musical masterpieces.
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