Skizzen, and: Concerto for Horn and Orchestra in E-flat Major, K. 370 b + 371 (review)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Skizzen. Vorgelegt von Ulrich Konrad. (Neue Ausgabe sämtliche Werke, Ser. X: Supplement; Werkgruppe 30: Studien, Skizzen, Entwürfe, Fragmente, Varia, Bd. 3.) Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998. [Text volume (paper). Abkürzungsverzeichnis, p. vii-ix; Einleitung, p. xi-xvii; krit. Bericht, p. 1-49; Anhang, p. 51-55; Verzeichnisse, p. 57-62; Register, p. 63-69. Skizzen (looseleaf). Facsim. reprod. (color), 98 ff.; diplomatic transcriptions, 98 ff. Issued in cloth slipcase. ISMN M-006-49614-3; BA 4610. DM 495.]

Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. Concerto for Horn and Orchestra in E-flat Major, K. 370^b + 371: A Facsimile Reconstruction of the Autograph Sources. With a foreword by John Brooks Howard and introductory essays by Christoph Wolff and Robert D. Levin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College Library; distributed by OMI, c1997. [Foreword, p. 3; the autograph scores (Wolff), p. 5-13; structural and textural issues (Levin), p. 15-22; facsim. reprod. (color), p. 23-60; appendix (Leipzig fragment), p. 61-66. Cloth. $112.50.]

Nearly a half-century since the inception of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (NMA) in 1955 and with the end of the enterprise in sight, Bärenreiter's publication in 1998 of this lavish volume of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's sketches is cause for celebration--and a gasp of relief that this project (by default, no doubt) fell at the end of the venture, for it is only in the past decade that the chronological positioning of the disparate leaves that constitute this portfolio of "sketches" could proceed with a confidence enabled by the publication in 1992 of Alan Tyson's magisterial Wasserzeichen-Katalog in the NMA supplement (ser. 10, sec. 33, pt. 2). The edition itself is very grand, offering two sets each of ninety-eight loose leaves--one in facsimile, the other in transcription--that invite both side-by-side study of Mozart's hand alongside its deciphering and the juxtaposition of these leaves with others, either from this collection or from sources to which they might originally have been linked. And there is Ulrich Konrad's fine book of critical commentary, which again makes it relatively easy to consult the facsimiles and transcriptions simultaneously, as one inevitably must.

Worrying an epistemology of the Mozart sketches, Konrad is much concerned to say how the sketch differs from something that he wants to call Werk:

[The sketches] alone arise from that state of artistic production that still wholly belongs to the condition of the work before it reaches the public and whose private nature permits the composer to dispense largely with the claims of order, of norm, and of intelligibility. Sketches function not as the instrument of musical understanding [Verständigung] with some other [mit einem Gegenüber]. (p. xi, my translation)

The inclination to establish from the outset a definition as categorical as this one no doubt has its pragmatic aspect. As written document, the semiotic "sketch" will signal its sense of privacy in all the obvious ways. But to suggest of such a document that this privacy constitutes a creative world distinct from the world of Mozart's "public" music --that had Mozart lived exclusively in this isolated sketch world, his music would have gone differently, being less constrained by such "public" signs as order, norm, and intelligibility--is to challenge our deepest instincts regarding the conceptual origins of Mozart's musical thought, and to dismiss the underlying tension, inherent in Enlightenment aesthetics, between the improvisatory impulse and the constraints of genre, rhetoric, and convention. Oddly, it is sometimes claimed that Beethoven's initial thoughts seem often enough prisoners of just such convention, and that this quality that Konrad wants to attribute to the Mozart sketch is achieved only through an extreme process of interrogation, internal and private, conducted in the sketchbooks.

Indeed, a happy virtue of this collection lies precisely in the refusal to define itself along these exclusionary lines. Among its most...