The sources for Mozart's biography

The principal source for Mozart's biography is the family correspondence (MBA), comprising a large collection of letters from Mozart, his father Leopold, mother, sister Nannerl and wife Constanze. They are marvellously informative but also problematic, in that they are a patchy record of Mozart's life, fullest for those times when, still based in Salzburg, he was travelling and he and his father were writing home. They are much thinner for his final decade in Vienna (1781–91) when the bulk of his great work was written; letters sent to him were not preserved, and letters from him vary in number (only four survive for 1786). The fact that a substantial proportion of the surviving letters from between 1788 and 1790 are to his fellow mason and banker Michael Puchberg requesting loans may have given biographers an exaggerated sense of his financial difficulties and professional distress in those years. The information contained in Mozart's letters was only gradually exploited by biographers. His sister Nannerl consulted some of them in order to answer the queries of his obituarist Friedrich Schlichtegroll. The majority were entrusted by Nannerl to Constanze and her second husband Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, and a heavily (and tendentiously) edited selection was printed in the Nissen biography of 1828. They were deposited in the Salzburg Dommusikverein und Mozarteum in the 1840s and 1850s where scholars could consult them. The majority but not all were made readily available in the editions by Ludwig Schiedermair in 1914 and Emily Anderson in 1938; the definitive seven-volume German edition was issued between 1962 and 1975.

A visitor to the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise, east of Paris, may come across the canopied Gothic Revival tomb of Heloise and Abelard. They are a much visited couple in that crowded suburb of the dead - though less than Jim Morrison, less than Colette - and were among the first there, moved with the permission of Napoleon in 1804. For Père Lachaise was a commercial venture and needed some famous bodies to attract the monied corpses of the Second Empire. Thus was Heloise written into the emerging romance of capital.

It was not the first time Heloise had been cast into romance, not to speak of other genres, at the beck of masculine power. In her own youth she had heard herself written by Abelard into heartfelt lyrics of their passion, and in the early 1130s she encountered his narrative of the subsequent castration and fall from ecclesiastical pride, the Historia calamitatum. In the late 1270s Heloise was recast (in that part of the Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun) as an instance of womanly virtue within an otherwise misogynist diatribe by a jealous husband;1 and later a treatise on courtly love was posthumously written under her (explicitly learned) authorship. Heloise’s own writings, however, record a profound and persistent will to choose her role, often in conflict with the men and institutional expectations around her, including Abelard, and their efforts to inscribe and circumscribe her. What she sometimes willed, and how she expressed that will in her letters, remain shocking.

For the eighteenth-century traveller, Salzburg could be a paradise. Off the beaten track and set at the foot of the Alps, it boasted natural beauties and a rich history: the city owed its post-Roman origin to the founding of the abbey of St Peter by St Rupert of Worms in 696 and of the cathedral by St Virgil in 774. In 1278 Rudolph of Habsburg made the archbishops of Salzburg imperial princes and during centuries of relative peace (except for the Peasants' War of 1525–6) the power and prestige of the court increased until it was the most important and influential archdiocese and sacred state in German-speaking Europe. By 1700, half a century before Mozart's birth, its boundaries stretched north and west into what is now Bavaria and east and south as far as Wiener Neustadt and Graz.

What the anonymous visitor to Salzburg praised so highly was the mechanical clock tower facing what is now the Mozartplatz. Constructed in the early eighteenth century, it was renovated in the 1750s to include music by the Kapellmeister Johann Ernst Eberlin and the court violinist Leopold Mozart. The works were published in 1759 by Lotter of Augsburg, together with a lengthy description of the Salzburg fortress, a short history of the city, and a charming, engraved cityscape. More than a music print, it was a souvenir for the sophisticated tourist, a memento of pleasant hours spent near the banks of the river Salzach or roaming the numerous churches, open squares and fountains that gave Salzburg its nickname, ‘the German Rome’.

Were there women authors in the Middle Ages? The answer depends on which term we consider to be in question, 'women' or 'author'. The burden of proof has long rested on the former, following the assumption that medieval authors were exclusively men. Accordingly, nearly every major work believed to have been written by a medieval woman - including the letters of Heloise, The Book of Margery Kempe, and many works by Christine de Pizan - has at various times been attributed to a male author. More recently, however, the term 'author' itself has come into question, as some scholars have asked whether authorship - at least in its familiar, modern sense - could be said to have existed in the Middle Ages at all. The author holds a privileged status in literary studies; more than simply a work's writer, the author carries an ideological function as the figure around whom ideas about literary tradition, authority, and creativity are organized. Yet what counts as an author has been historically variable.1 The idea that authors were the sole originators of their texts is a relatively recent one, supplanting earlier models that invested those origins in divine or historically remote sources; likewise, the modern idea of the author as a single, creative individual holds limited relevance for medieval textual culture, in which many texts were collaborative, anonymous, or adopted as common property. Those who study literature by medieval women find themselves facing a critical quandary: is it possible to speak of medieval women authors if the ‘author’ did not exist in the Middle Ages?

A sharp impression of medieval women's role 'beneath the pulpit' in the sense 'subjected to the institutional power of the Church' is first implied, and then defied, in Chaucer's Friar's Tale. This tale criticizes the abuse of ecclesiastical law to extort money from a woman. It is introduced by the Friar after he has ostensibly complimented the Wife of Bath on her learning, but urged her to leave discussion of serious moral matters to expert preachers and religious educators (male, university-trained, such as himself). Following this reassertion of masculine control of the theological domain the Friar proceeds to a tale expressly concerned with contested jurisdiction in which, however, an old woman unexpectedly has the final say. It will be useful to dwell on this tale by way of introduction to a chapter devoted to the rights, limitations, rituals, and contributions of women in relation to Mother Church.

Where the view is held that a body contains something - as it is now and was in the Middle Ages - every person lives in an enclosure. But a particular form of medieval devotion also elaborated this structural metaphor as an entire way of life, arranging a person's every daily thought and activity so as to limit even the body's contact with the world, enclosing that person permanently within the protections of a dwelling. Because the defining gesture of such devotion was complete withdrawal from social encounters, enclosed men and women were called 'anchorites' after the Greek anachorein, meaning 'to retire, retreat'. Since such isolation was, by its nature, a piety of strict discipline, an anchorite also tried to leave behind all physical comfort, and the anchoritic dwelling was itself often painfully small, sometimes no more than eight feet (2.4 m) square. It was commonly attached to the north side of a church so that the anchorite’s main outward view would be through a window which faced the altar (but even this opening was sometimes no more than twenty-one inches (53 cm) square). The dwelling could also have two other windows, one for obtaining food and other necessities, the other for communicating with priests or visitors, but, even here, communication was limited; these windows were mostly kept closed, and when opened were still to be covered with a curtain. Although the dwelling had to have a door for the anchorite to enter in the first place, it was blocked up as part of the ceremony of enclosure, at which point the Office for the Dead and prayers for the dying were said. Once enclosed, in other words, the anchorite was only meant to leave his or her dwelling in death, and its narrow confine was therefore, in principle as well as practice, not so much a house as a tomb.

If the name of Mozart is a touchstone for innate, absolute musicality, probably no genre has done more to accomplish this than the composer's keyboard sonatas. Collectively associated with such attributes as simplicity and naturalness of material, modesty of tone and facility of technique, they encapsulate the reception not only of Mozart but of a whole ‘Classical style’. This state of affairs has been encouraged by the tendency to view the keyboard as a ‘neutral’ medium, one useful for theoretical demonstrations in the classroom, in which Mozart is, as it were, a model pupil. It has certainly also been encouraged by the works' very wide exposure as piano teaching material. Both cases help to determine, and continually reinforce, the centrality of this repertory to the canon of Western music.

Yet there is another strand of reception that suggests anxiety about this very image of the sonatas, one that tends to imply that better Mozart can be found in other instrumental genres, including those in which the piano features either as soloist or in an ensemble. Within the output for solo piano alone, there is undoubtedly much that is more colourful, dramatic and elaborate than the governing image would suggest, including some of the sonatas themselves. In this context the pedagogical explanation has often been invoked. Thus the discourse of the sonatas precisely reflects the original teaching purposes the works were meant to serve, and more broadly the amateur market for such works at the time, considerations that have retained their relevance up to the present.

In a memorable scene from Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, Salieri is introduced to Mozart's music through a performance of the Adagio from the Serenade for Winds in B flat major, K.361. It causes him to swoon: ‘It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God,’ Salieri exclaims in a mixture of admiration and bitterness, ‘and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard – and it was the voice of an obscene child!’ (Act 1, scene 5). Although Shaffer's play takes many poetic liberties with historical facts, this remark reflects much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of Mozart: a child prodigy (or idiot savant) who never grew up, yet wrote inspired, virtually perfect music. This comment put in the fictional Salieri's mouth also makes clear that Mozart's melodic gift is not limited to vocal music; indeed, for Shaffer you are as likely to hear the ‘voice of God’ in one of his secular instrumental works as in Mozart's sacred vocal music.

In fact, vocal music was of great importance to Mozart, and he was a gifted composer for the human voice. In the hierarchy of music before 1800, vocal genres – opera, oratorio and cantatas – reigned supreme, while even the loftier forms of orchestral music – symphonies and concertos – took a subordinate place. The main problem was summed up in Fontanelle's oft-repeated question: how could a sonata express an Affekt or emotion without words to guide the performer and listener? Vocal music and professional singers enjoyed a prestige that simply was not yet available to instrumental music.

Mozart was a prolific composer of orchestral music, writing numerous symphonies, divertimenti, serenades and cassations in the 1760s and 1770s, and six remarkable symphonies while based in Vienna in the 1780s. Although his contribution to the orchestral literature is predictably diverse, the genres in which he works are not as musically distinct in practical terms as nomenclature would seem to suggest. Divertimento, serenade and cassation each carried slightly different connotations in eighteenth-century Europe – according to the theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch the cassation was specifically designed for performance ‘in the evenings, outdoors, or on public streets’, for example – but Mozart uses the terms more or less interchangeably. Many of Mozart's Salzburg symphonies, too, are closely linked to his serenade and operatic overture repertories, the symphonies K.45, 87, 120, 135, 161/163, 121 and 102 either deriving from or being transformed into the overtures to Mozart's operas La finta semplice, Mitridate re di Ponto, Ascanio in Alba, Lucio Silla, Il sogno di Scipione, La finta giardiniera and Il re pastore respectively, and the cassation K.100 and the serenades K.204, 250 and 320 all reappearing in symphonic versions by Mozart or his father Leopold.

Irrespective of generic context, Mozart was acutely sensitive to matters of instrumentation and instrumental effect where orchestral writing was concerned. His meticulous attitude towards the spacing of chords in the wind section is evident not only in adjustments he makes to his own manuscripts, but also in amendments to the work of his pupil Thomas Attwood. Even in his very earliest compositions, Mozart is attuned to issues of orchestration, asking Nannerl to ‘remind me to give the horn something worthwhile to do’ in a symphony written in London in 1764. Throughout his life, in fact, Mozart reacts to orchestral colours and effects he witnesses at home and abroad. After experiencing the famed Mannheim orchestra first-hand in 1778, Mozart laments to his father: ‘Ah, if only we had clarinets too [in Salzburg]! You cannot imagine the glorious effect of a symphony with flutes, oboes and clarinets.’

Until the second half of the nineteenth century composers tended to work within a lingua franca, which did not prevent their music from having a discernible individuality. Their personalities are evident both in matters of style and in peculiarities of notation and terminology. These tend to be overlooked in conservatory training, which dispenses general definitions of terminology with presumed universal validity. The primary sources of performance practice information for Mozart and other eighteenth-century musicians are the treatises, particularly those of Mozart's father on violin playing and that of C. P. E. Bach on keyboard playing.

What follows is an attempt to cover the principal areas of idiomatic performance practice in Mozart. Given the constraints of space, emphasis will be placed upon the relationship between Mozart's notation and its execution. The treatment of individual domains and instruments is drawn both from the treatises and the author's study of Mozart's notational practice.

Society, tempo and character

Mozart's music incarnates a cosmopolitan vernacular depicting a wide range of dramatic and emotional situations, which are intimately bound up with the social conventions of his day. There is scarcely a musical gesture, from the courtly and martial march to the sighing appoggiatura, that is not related to societal relationships and functions, physical gestures, or emotional archetypes. It is Mozart's singular achievement to have enriched this universally understood vocabulary with uncanny acuity of perception in matters of human motivation and character, supported by a sophisticated control of dramatic and structural events from the smallest detail to the largest arc.

In the history and criticism of Mozart's opere buffe, all roads lead back to Carlo Goldoni. The comic works of the Venetian lawyer-turned-playwright influence every Mozart opera buffa in one way or another. Mozart's first, La finta semplice, comes from a Goldoni libretto (by way of Marco Coltellini); his last, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, use topics and language that Goldoni had treated earlier; and all of them divide the characters into the Goldonian parti buffe, parti di mezzo carattere and parti serie. The pressing question about Mozart's opera buffa repertory, then, is not whether Goldoni influenced Mozart, but how he did so.

The difficulty in striking a consensus about Goldoni's influence on Mozart comes largely from tensions inherent in the Goldonian repertory itself. In the eighteenth century, as today, Goldoni's reform of comedy was generally understood in one of two contrasting ways: as a technical achievement, or as an ethical one. According to the former view, Goldoni did not reject the commedia dell'arte – the often ribald improvisations of professional actors which had been the basis of Italian popular comedy for some two centuries – but rather improved on it. Replacing improvised scenarios with fully scripted comedies gave him control over pacing and clarified the action. The finest representative of this kind of comedy was also the most famous in the eighteenth century: Il servitore di due padroni (1745), a work that Mozart had hoped to turn into a Singspiel.

One of the many ironies surrounding The Book of Margery Kempe is its now canonical status in English literary history. Identified in the modern era only in 1934, it remained an eccentricity, and a relatively obscure one, until about twenty years ago. Not that it was entirely neglected: J. P. Morgan is reported to have read it on his deathbed. But now it is a staple of American undergraduate English literature education, included in the major anthologies of English literature and routinely taught in introductory classes. Sparkling new editions for the classroom recently have been produced, not to mention a website and postmodern gay novelistic adaptation.

But if her Book has achieved a place in the literary canon, Margery Kempe herself has not been taken entirely seriously as a visionary, let alone a candidate for canonization by the Church. Being proved divinely inspired was never far from her mind: she paid a visit to Julian of Norwich, her contemporary, precisely to be reassured as to her contact with the divine. And canonization was perhaps not absent from the minds of the men who wrote down her book as she dictated it, shaping her reminiscences to fit into a long line of holy women. But Margery’s mystical and prophetic experiences have not been subjected to much serious consideration; the inevitable comparison with Julian of Norwich’s austere and theologically ambitious Revelation has heretofore worked to the disadvantage of the rambling Book of Margery Kempe.

The tripartite division of medieval women into the categories of virgin, wife, and widow screens out the very possibility of female fellowship, community, and even love. Under the system derived from patristic sources, women were classified by their sexual/marital status, and this medieval distinction had the effect of rendering relationships between women a meaningless or even illegible aspect of femininity. Female interactions simply did not register on the medieval radar screen, and as a result, they slip through scholarly studies as well. Where were the women who formed communities with each other, engaged in deep, abiding friendship together, and experienced sexual bonds with other women? The Middle Ages is positively verbose on the topics of male friendship and the dangers of sexual relations between men, and yet it was relatively silent about female friendship and love. One way of understanding this relative silence is to attribute it to the prevailing misogyny of the Middle Ages, which simply took female bonding and sexuality less seriously than it did male bonding and male sexuality. This explanation, however, falls into the trap of granting medieval misogyny hegemonic status in shaping and representing women’s lives. Feminist scholars dealt with a similar problem when they first attempted to discern women and gender issues that the ideologies – past and present – obscured from historical record. What happens when readers and scholars similarly refuse to read medieval texts and study medieval history according to medieval taxonomies of women? Apart from the contexts of female religious communities and spirituality, where might we begin to look for the varied forms of female fellowship that medieval women might create together or that medieval texts might represent?

Mozart wrote German opera throughout his compositional career – from the age of twelve until three months before he died. His career comprised the first flowering of German opera, from its origins as an adaptation of opéra comique (which was in the process of integrating elements of Italian comic opera), with its characteristic alternation of spoken dialogue and music, to its emergence in a distinctly Viennese dialect.

Mozart's two greatest theatrical successes in his lifetime were in fact German operas, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Die Zauberflöte. Without these two operas the transformation of that provincial adaptation (just one of many at the time) into an exportable commodity might not have occurred. They were essential for the development of an international German repertory, one that became translated rather than one that was the result of translation. While Mozart's German operas were not the only ones that contributed to this development, operas such as Peter Winter's Das unterbrochene Opferfest and Franz Xaver Süssmayr's Der Spiegel von Arkadien (both 1794) would not have enjoyed their international and long-lived success without the precedent established by Mozart. In fact, these operas would probably not have been written in the first place.

Mozart's German operas exemplify the historical development of the genre: both his early and his later works are stylistically consistent in a general way with those of his contemporaries. But Mozart was not a typical late eighteenth-century opera composer. Die Entführung and Die Zauberflöte form only a miniscule part of the contemporary repertory, yet they were works of the highest compositional virtuosity and were performed in virtually every German opera house. The scope of his output in other vocal and instrumental genres, the consistently high quality of his music and the virtuosity of his compositional mastery were unmatched.