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.

In a late medieval society in which young maidens were the ideal of beauty and desirability, the widow was not the most favoured subject among authors. Chaucer drew three notable portraits of widows - the Wife of Bath, Criseyde, and the poor peasant widow in The Nun's Priest's Tale - in addition to the widow in The Friar's Tale. Other widows appear in The Canterbury Tales but their status is not elaborated. Alisoun, despite outliving five husbands, is not called the Widow of Bath. For the fifteenth century, William Dunbar's poem, 'The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo', provides a picture of a widow sharing some of the Wife of Bath's robust sexual views. The literatures of France and Spain, and of course Italy, also feature lively widow stories. Literary attitudes towards widows cover a wide range: January in The Merchant's Tale says he will marry a maid rather than a widow because widows can take property without producing heirs; in The Prioress's Tale, the mother of the young boy is described as a poor widow raising her son alone; and in Troilus and Criseyde the allure of a young widow's black clothes forms part of the temptation to romance. Historical backgrounds for all these perceptions of widows will form part of this chapter.

Widows were ubiquitous in medieval Europe. Contrary to the popular myth that the most common cause of death for adult women was childbirth and that, as a consequence, men outnumbered women, the majority of women survived their husbands. Some, like the Wife of Bath, outlived several. From fifteenth-century rural wills of adult males from Bedfordshire, we learn that 72 per cent had a surviving wife.

Medieval persons showed nuanced awareness of human lifespan development. The familiar 'ages of man' texts generally followed one of three conceptual systems: the biologists' theory of three ages (youth, maturity, and old age); the physiologists' theory of four ages (childhood, youth, maturity, and old age), corresponding to the four humours, seasons, and elements; and the astrologers' theory of seven ages (infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, old age, decrepitude) following the Ptolemaic structure of the universe. By the later Middle Ages a stable set of terms divided childhood into seven-year segments: infantia (infancy), pueritia (childhood), and adolescentia (adolescence). These demarcations were based primarily upon age but also considered the social, emotional, and mental development of the individual. Prior to the age of seven or infantia, an infant girl was not considered to be a fully rational and responsible agent. The transition to pueritia was marked by growing personal awareness and social accountability, and the move into adolescentia was marked by the onset of menarche and secondary sexual characteristics. At adolescentia, regarded as twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, young people could marry according to canon law or could break a marriage contract arranged in their childhood by paying a fine equivalent to the value of the marriage. Although remaining unmarried was a possibility, the life options available to most girls were limited to marriage, religious vocation, or some form of domestic employment or household management. The social ideal, of course, was for young medieval girls to marry and have children, for the normative course of secular life led a girl directly from her father’s house as a child and daughter to her husband’s house as a wife and mother.

This volume explores medieval women’s involvement with textual culture. The women of our study are chiefly those living in England, viewed as part of a greater medieval Europe. To do full justice to such involvement, our title would need to be very long indeed; the whole volume might in fact be seen as an attempt to qualify or tease out the meanings of ‘medieval women’s writing’. The image featured as frontispiece and paperback cover of this book speaks eloquently to many of these issues, hence provides ways of beginning.

The painting, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Johnson Collection 402), dates from c. 1500–20. Although not painted in England, its subject would have been recognized by English observers: for it depicts scenes from the life of Mary Magdalene deriving from The Golden Legend of Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine (compiled 1259–66).1 Chaucer drew on this Legenda aurea for his tale of St Cecilia (and perhaps for his lost Magdalene legend); the early English printer William Caxton produced his own edition from Latin, French, and English sources (subsequently reprinted by Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, and Notary). Our image and this spread of dates thus suggest a culture that, while alive to local and temporal particulars – as detailed in the fashionable costumes – nonetheless preserves some remarkable continuities in experience over time and space. Continuities may also be read across the essays of this volume, suggesting that ‘medieval women’s writing’ provides (with due account taken of experiences differentiated by age, class, and marital status) viable terms of analysis.

In 1406 Sir Henry (later Lord) Fitzhugh, trusted servant of King Henry IV, visited Vadstena, the Bridgettine monastery for men and women in Sweden. Vadstena was the mother-house of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour and had been founded by the controversial continental mystic St Bridget of Sweden, who had died in 1373 and had been canonized in 1391. Fitzhugh was so impressed by what he saw that he gave one of his manors near Cambridge as the future site for an English Bridgettine foundation. It was not until 1415 that Henry V, son of Henry IV, laid the foundation-stone of Syon Abbey at Twickenham in Middlesex and Fitzhugh's dream became a reality. But Fitzhugh's generous gesture is an indication of the degree of pious and aristocratic interest in the Swedish visionary and prophet in early fifteenth-century England.

Marriage contained and shaped the lives of the vast majority of the medieval populace of both sexes. By 1200, moreover, the jurisdiction over this quintessentially lay institution was firmly in the hands of the clergy, who were, by definition, male. This clerical/masculine primacy corresponds to the official ideology of marriage. As guardians of the institution, the clergy in no way challenged its traditional patriarchal structure. Although the Church would from time to time attempt to curb the more brutal manifestations of the husband's prerogatives over the wife, the reintroduction of Roman law into the canon law of the Church in the high Middle Ages tended to ratify the husband's position of authority.

The married woman’s position was additionally compromised by the clergy’s traditional bias in favour of celibacy, which assigned to marriage a less estimable position in the hierarchy of salvation than either virginity or chaste widowhood. The Middle Ages inherited the patristic reckoning which accorded virgins a hundred-fold reward in the kingdom of heaven, consecrated widows sixty-fold, and matrons a mere thirty-fold.1 Awareness of this distinction was ever present to the spiritually ambitious women of the period. Thus Christina of Markyate (died between 1155 and 1166), a daughter of well-to-do burghers who struggled to extricate herself from a forced marriage in order to preserve her virginity for Christ, gives an unassailable response to her clerical interlocutor’s contention that both matrons and virgins would be saved: ‘“Nor do I think that virgins only will be saved . . . [But] if many mothers of families are saved, which you likewise say, and it is true, certainly virgins are saved more easily.”’ Christina’s appreciation of the hierarchical relation of virgin to matron is repeatedly acknowledged by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, albeit with humorous complacency.

Implicit in one of the more commonly held beliefs about our understanding of artworks and their creators is an oddly skewed relationship between proximity and distance. According to this view, early critics find themselves in the position of a spectator who, standing just a few inches away from one of Monet's paintings of Rouen cathedral, sees only daubs of paint and vague shapes. Just as the outline of the cathedral emerges only when the viewer takes a few steps back, so the image of the artist and his works is supposed to gain in clarity the farther we withdraw from it in time. This theory of reception has been applied most consistently to figures whose works were first deemed to be particularly challenging and thereafter enjoyed a more or less continuous afterlife. Mozart was such a figure. Recognized by his contemporaries as a prodigious though intractable talent, venerated as a ‘classic’ by later generations, he continued to pose interpretive challenges even for the most perceptive musicians of the mid-and late nineteenth century. ‘We are beginning to understand Mozart’, Berlioz wrote in 1862, and, indeed, we are still coming to terms with Mozart today. With increased understanding, however, comes loss – of the sense for precisely those idiosyncrasies that made Mozart's music such a challenge for early audiences. The study of Mozart reception in the nineteenth century is tantamount to a search for lost images, an activity that may ultimately lead us to reconsider our own assumptions about the composer and his works.

Lyrics

Only three late Middle English lyrics are explicitly attributed to women in the surviving manuscripts: a poem in praise of Venus by 'Queen Elizabeth', almost certainly Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of Edward IV; a hymn to the Virgin attributed to 'a holy ankaresse of Maunsffeld'; and another hymn in praise of the Virgin by Eleanor Percy. Stylistically, each of these lyrics is highly accomplished and self-consciously literary, differing little from the elevated verse produced by professional male poets during this period. The form of Woodville's hymn to Venus is a complex elaboration of the sestina (a complicated continental verse form of six-line stanzas and an envoy); the anchoress's poem is an excellent imitation of Lydgate's fashionable aureate style; and Percy's prayer is a sophisticated macaronic poem, a poem that mixes two languages, each Middle English stanza ending with a Latin line which rhymes with that of the previous stanza. It may be that the ability of these women to produce lyrics so similar to those by the period's celebrated male poets led to their being credited with authorship. But if these women did gain some measure of recognition because of their ability to write like men, it is nonetheless interesting that, in all three cases, the subject matter is the praise of a powerful female figure.

Friedrich Kerst, assessing the significance of Mozart early in the twentieth century, introduces Mozart: The Man and the Artist Revealed in His Own Words in unashamedly hagiographical fashion:

Packing his prose with overworked generalizations about Mozart and his music – brightness and purity, eternal youthfulness, blissful ignorance aligned with genius – Kerst is one of countless late eighteenth-, nineteenth-and twentieth-century writers to worship at Mozart's shrine. In the last fifty years in particular, Mozart scholars have attempted either directly or indirectly to negate such stereotypes and the laudatory tone that accompanies them. Thanks to pioneering archival work on written and musical sources, and on late eighteenth-century aesthetic and theoretical trends manifest in his music, scholars are now in a better position than ever to evaluate both Mozart's impact on his contemporaries and successors, and his continuing relevance to an ever-changing musical world.

While unadulterated hyperbole about Mozart is a distant memory in scholarly circles, it flourishes as never before outside the academy. The bicentennial celebrations in 1991 outstripped in scope and worldwide participation all preceding and succeeding celebrations of a composer's work; the critical and commercial success of the cinematic version of Amadeus (1984) demonstrated the extraordinary public fascination with Mozart and his life story; and predictable millennial polls, aimed at identifying the greatest composers of all time, put Mozart close to the top, even in the company of twentieth-century pop artists who were always likely to garner the popular vote.