The Mozart Society of America met for their seventh biennial conference, organized by Edmund Goehring at the University of Western Ontario, on the theme ‘Mozart and Modernity’. On the whole well balanced, the conference offered a variety of perspectives from which to consider the place of Mozart's music in the modern world, including performance practice, theory and analysis, and cultural criticism. The proceedings opened on Thursday afternoon with a keynote address by Robert B. Pippin (University of Chicago), who presented material from his book The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Discussing Hitchcock's film-noir thriller Vertigo (1958), Pippin focused his analytical lens on the character development of Judy Barton (Kim Novak), who impersonates the murdered wife of a friend of the main protagonist, John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (James Stewart). Though not directly related to Mozart, this address foreshadowed one thread of the conference, and the focus of three individual papers: the use of Mozart's operas in cinema.
The Friday morning session focused on issues of notation as related to performance practice. Kevin Ngo (University of Calgary) argued that urtext editions of Mozart's piano works discourage the kind of improvisatory performance central to eighteenth-century keyboard style. Ngo presented his own prototypes for alternative notation that he felt more appropriately encourage improvisation. Mary Robbins (Austin, Texas) focused on Mozart's expression markings as a basis for the appreciation of his music in the modern critical climate. Suggesting that nuances that are fundamental to the beauty of Mozart's music would be lost on modern critics, Robbins compared allied compositional elements (rhythm, harmony, form and so forth) to modern information systems and data transmission.
The afternoon offered a mix of cultural criticism and musical analysis. João Pedro Cachopo (University of Chicago/Universidada Nova de Lisboa) discussed the role of Mozart reception in the encounter between opera and film by focusing on the 1975 experimental film Mozart in Love. Cachopo argued that the sung sequences, mostly of numbers from Mozart's operas, display a contrast between the untrained voices of the actors and the trained voices of professional singers, telling us about the variety of ways in which opera can be reimagined and reappropriated in the age of technological reproduction. James DiNardo (University of Notre Dame) analysed the Kyrie from Mozart's ‘Great’ Mass in C minor, k427, in light of sonata theory and formal function, theoretical paradigms that are not usually applied to Mozart's sacred vocal music. He problematized theories of classical phrase structure by arguing that the outer sections of the Kyrie more nearly represent an earlier fugal practice, while the beauty of the middle aria-like passage for solo soprano depends on the underlying phrase structure as revealed through form-functional analysis.
Marina Gallagher (University of British Columbia) presented a new approach to understanding the character of Despina in Così fan tutte, arguing that Despina subverts social and gender hierarchies by equating herself with her upper-class employers, their aristocratic suitors and the libertine philosopher Don Alfonso through her use of musical topoi. Gallagher claimed that Despina distances herself from Fiordiligi and Dorabella's old-fashioned views regarding relationships by rejecting the pastoral mode of her arias and replacing it with the minuet and march in the Act 1 Sextet and the Act 2 Finale. Paul Corneilson (Packard Humanities Institute), current president of the society, discussed how serial composer George Rochberg's work for small orchestra Music for the Magic Theater (1965) uses a transcription of the Adagio from Mozart's Divertimento in B flat major k287 as a foil against serial music in an effort to combine the present and the past. Corneilson offered suggestions as to why Rochberg chose Mozart specifically as the antithesis of modern music, and placed Music for the Magic Theater in historical context with other modern works incorporating Mozart's compositions. The evening concert by Ensemble Made in Canada featured Mozart's Piano Quartet in G minor, k478, Jean Lesage's Le Projet Mozart (2006) and Arvo Pärt's Mozart-Adagio (1992).
The Saturday morning session dealt largely with different nationalistic experiences of Mozart's music. Martin Nedbal (University of Kansas) revealed how primary sources related to the 1887 Don Giovanni centennial festival in Prague reflected the conflicted experience of the German community in late nineteenth-century Bohemia. On the one hand, Nedbal observed, Prague's German community used Mozart's legacy to assert its cultural superiority to the Czechs, who organized their own extensive and prominently anti-German Mozart festival. On the other hand, festival organizers attempted to find a balance between Prague's German liberal faction – promoting the idea of a multiethnic, but German-dominated, Habsburg central Europe – and the German national faction, oriented towards a Wagnerian brand of ethnic nationalism. Yen-Ling Liu (Soochow University) deconstructed the documentary film From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China (1979), tracing the efforts of a Western artist to instil idiomatic expressive effects among musicians struggling to master a foreign repertory. Analysing the cultural dynamics of the individual scenes, Liu demonstrated how the film emphasizes a utopian erasure of the boundaries separating China and the West, turning Mozart into an emblem of a universal ‘world music’.
My paper (Adem Merter Birson, Hofstra University) reconsidered the ‘Turkish’ musical elements of Die Entführung aus dem Serail by examining them from the perspective of cultural hybridity. Moving away from scholarship that categorizes the Turkish topic under the rubric of exoticism – in which the West reaffirms its own values in contrast to a denigrated ‘other’ – I considered musical numbers like the overture, Osmin's rage aria, the Janissary chorus and Osmin and Pedrillo's drunken duet for the ways in which Turkish musical elements interact with European ones to create a stylistic hybrid that has dramatic function in the unfolding of the plot. Adeline Mueller (Mount Holyoke College) examined the appearance of Mozart's early opera buffa La finta giardiniera in the Austrian biopic Mozarts Leben, Lieben und Leiden (1920). She demonstrated how, by 1921, La finta giardiniera was being hailed as a subversive, ironic masterpiece by advocates of neoclassicism, and considered the opera's implications for Mozart historiography and the aspirations of Austria's film and opera industries.
The conference concluded with a lively roundtable discussion on Wye J. Allanbrook's posthumous publication The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), presented by Nathan Martin (University of Michigan), James Currie (State University of New York, Buffalo), Edmund Goehring (University of Western Ontario) and moderator Adeline Mueller (Mount Holyoke). The Mozart Society fostered an engaging, interdisciplinary and collegial environment, welcoming each paper with enthusiasm and healthy debate.
