Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief and Deception by David Schroeder (review)

388 letters in canada 1999 hopes that critics of language and literature, among others, will take up her call for further study of these documents and more fully elucidate Johnson's language. Murray contributes an essay that points out some of the textual and rhetorical strategies Johnson employs, yet there is much more to be said about his use of English. (LINDA WARLEY) David Schroeder. Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief and Deception Yale University Press. x, 212. US $25.00 Eh, scrivi, dico; e tutto Io prendo su me stessa. [Write what I tell you; I take all the responsibility.] the Countess dictating to Susanna a letter for the Count Le nozze di Figaro, act 3 scene 10 Presuming letters reach their destination, are they read, responded to, lost, or destroyed, or are they savoured, shared, cherished, and preserved? Do they lose their privateness and circulate as public documents B perhaps in altered or sanitized form B as records of an author's whereabouts, observations , attitudes, and ambitions? Once published, is their `primary source' status challenged by post-Freudian or deconstructionist readings that discern hidden desires, deceptions, and ironies behind and beyond the written, now printed (and translated), word? For Canadian musicologist David Schroeder, whose subject is the voluminous and fascinating Mozart family correspondence, the answer lies somewhere in between. Discouraged by literal readings of the letters as`trusted documents' (for example, Robert Marshall, Mozart Speaks 1991) or psychoanalytic approaches that misappropriate `twentieth-century methodology to the Mozarts [in] blissful ignorance of eighteenth-century life and customs' (for example, Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life 1995), Schroeder opts for a mediating position grounded in eighteenth-century epistolary traditions. In the letters exchanged between Wolfgang and his father, Leopold, Schroeder traces the young Mozart's defiance and subversion of his father's plan to publish a moral biography based on their correspondence. In the absence of direct evidence for this grand epistolary project, Schroeder builds his case upon several interdependent and cumulative pieces of evidence. Eschewing the obvious monetary rewards to be reaped from a biography of the `wunderkind,' especially in the wake of the family's lucrative European tour in the mid-1760s, Schroeder focuses instead on the literary rationale for the enterprise. Roots of the biographical project are traced to Leopold's religious education and absorption of the enlightened views espoused in the Germanic moralistic humanities 389 writings of Baron Melchior Grimm and virtuous epistolary manuals of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, both of whom were Mozart family acquaintances. Given that the epistolary mode was a staple of eighteenthcentury novels, journalistic correspondence, biographies, and memoirs, and an accepted mode of moralistic instruction, Schroeder contends that Leopold's letters, especially those directed to his son during the latter's 1777B79 journey to Paris (where Wolfgang's mother died in July 1778), participated in the epistolary commerce. Leopold's advice, admonitions, and harangues repeatedly met with his son's dissimulating responses and harlequinesque masquerading. Although `never entirely privy to his father's apparent plan,' Wolfgang, now a young man in his early twenties and liberated from his father, fought against the proffered astringent and moralistic advice by fabricating stories, adopting an obsequious tone, offering convoluted explanations about his compositional endeavours, and writing scatological letters to his cousin Bäsle. Indeed, his strategies of deception, evasion, subterfuge and verbal pantomime amount to àvirtuosity of deceit' rivalled only by the French philosophes, among whom Voltaire was the recognized master of French epistolary ventriloquism. Intentionality looms large in this book, leading to forced interpretations and language of collusion. The immediate aim of moral instruction need not be incompatible with the long-term goal of posthumous publication of the letters for posterity. If plans for a biography vanished with the child Mozart, why did Wolfgang continue the epistolary charade following his ultimate acts of revolt B his move to Vienna in 1781 and marriage to Constanze the following year? Further explanation of the moralizing tone in his correspondence with Constanze during their courtship and his elliptical letters to her from his Berlin journey in the spring of 1789 could also be offered. Welcome are Schroeder's fresh and frank translations of selected letters and his...