Patterns of Mozart reception in the nineteenth century

The history of nineteenth-century music is on the verge of being rewritten. There is emerging, in addition to a chronicle of composers and works, and of a thick description of musical cultures and institutions, the possibility of writing the music history of the century in terms of its reception of composers of the previous century and before. The fusion of traditional modes of historical narrative with views of the century that give due weight to questions of reception is one of the most exciting opportunities facing music history today.
Work to date on writing the history of nineteenth-century music that gives due attention to questions of reception centres on Beethoven, and the last few years have seen the publication of a number of monograph and article-length studies of the composer’s significance for the nineteenth century (1-4). In contrast, studies of Mozart in the nineteenth century are much older and much more uneven in quality, although the possible scope of such a field of endeavour was laid out a quarter of a century ago (7). Two works (5-6) have sketched out the ground, but can only really be considered as points of departure for a much wider scholarly enterprise. Other studies have pointed up the range of material and the interpretative possibilities (8-9). Broadly speaking the areas of interest are the performance, review and publication of Mozart’s works after 1800, the status his compositions hold in works of literature, and the ways in which nineteenth-century instrumental compositions recast and respond to Mozart’s music.
Pilot studies for this project have clearly demonstrated that the patterns of reception of Mozart’s oeuvre in the nineteenth century differ from those of Beethoven’s works. Questions of performance are where studies of the two composers’ works overlap most significantly, and in documenting this aspect fully, the project will be setting a standard for the study of performance of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century music during the rest of the nineteenth century. It is within the literary domain that Mozart’s works figure so conspicuously: accounts of Don Giovanni by Kierkegaard (Either/Or) or Shaw (Man and Superman) are well known but are only the tip of an extremely large iceberg. Similarly, the instrumental responses to the same work (Chopin’s op.2 Variations on ‘La ci darem la mano’, for example) that are known are only a tiny fraction of the surviving material.

The objectives of ‘Patterns of Mozart Reception in the Nineteenth Century’ are twofold. First of all, it is essential to establish accurate datasets and typologies of instrumental works, performances, publications, reviews, literary responses to Mozart in the nineteenth century. These datasets will then serve as the basis for the second part of the project which is to produce a series of article-length studies of issues arising out of the datasets; such studies will range from small detailed studies to larger panoramic views of parts of the subject that will be undertaken in later years of the project.