128 BOOK REVIEWS

1770) and his hapless son of the same name. Avison senior worked his way upwards
from a poor childhood as the son of a wait, ‘yet by the prime of his life [...] was
consorting with the principal figures of the Newcastle social world, with respectable
clergymen and land-owning gentry and nobility [...] and as early as 1761 he was
describing himself as a “gentleman”.’ Although he achieved a national reputation as
a composer, like many other musicians in the book he took on a wide range of work,
combining ‘teaching, composition, writing and concert promotion with his income
from the organists’ jobs at St Nicholas and St John’. Charles Avison junior (1751-1795)
worked as a keyboard player – church organist, harpsichord soloist and theatre band
musician – and he also taught. Despite a better start in life than his father, he
struggled to remain solvent and died heavily in debt.
One gains a sense of the professional musician’s ambivalent status: a poorly paid
servant or tradesman when providing a service such as playing for a function; a
relatively well paid teacher (better than now) to amateurs of the nobility and gentry,
and an uneasy equal with those amateurs when providing much-needed professional
stiffening for musical gatherings and concerts (the music-loving Earl of Sandwich,
mentioned above as a leading figure in the Catch Club, is reputed to have told the
professional instrumentalists he employed that if they wanted to be paid they must
dine with the servants; if not, they could dine with him).
Both books contain much material for the social historian, but anyone with musical
interests will want to know what the music sounded like. Works by Charles Avison have
appeared on a number of recordings, and a CD of cello concertos by John Garth has
recently been released to considerable acclaim. But the clarinet concertos of Thomas
Wright remain unpublished and unrecorded. The glee is an unknown genre for most
people and Robins expresses hope that his book will inspire revival of the repertoire.
One doubts if a concert consisting entirely of catches and glees would sustain a modern
audience’s interest; the music was designed for performers, not listeners. A programme
that interspersed catches and glees with anecdotes of eighteenth-century club culture
might entertain however. And anyone allowed through the doors of a so-called
gentleman’s club today can experience eighteenth-century indulgence in alcohol,
tobacco (at the time of writing) and misogyny as living tradition.
Jeremy Barlow
Independent scholar

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopaedia. Edited by Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. 662 pp. 978-0-5218-5659-1 / 0-5218-
5659-0; also eBook format.
Throughout his anniversary year of 2006 the phenomenon of Mozart continued to be
an endless source of fascination and appeal to musicians, scholars and listeners alike.
Amid the whirlwind of recent activity in print this Cambridge Encyclopaedia occupies
a pre-eminent position. It covers all aspects of Mozart and his world, functioning both
as a starting point for information on specific works, people, places and concepts as
well as a summation of current thinking about Mozart. The extended articles on
genres reflect the latest in scholarship and new ways of thinking about the works,
while the articles on people and places provide a wide-ranging historical framework.
More than 500 entries by renowned scholars are characterised by an accessible and
entertaining style, representing today’s greater interest in previously unexplored

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 Book Reviews 129

aspects of Mozart’s life, context and reception. This is a magnificently produced and
definitive single volume that will satisfy both the casual browser and the reader who
wants to know absolutely every fact about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Among the most thought-provoking entries, Ulrich Konrad’s piece on
‘compositional method’ is nothing less than inspirational, dismissing a number of
outdated myths along the way. At the outset he asks:

What do we mean when we talk about compositional creativity, the process of

musical creation or compositional method? What is its object? If it is tangible,
where does it reside? Does it lend itself to historical research or to depiction by
scholarly treatment? The questions are elementary but the answers are
complicated.

He then proceeds to identify four typical phases. Mozart concentrated on an idea for
the work and the engagement of his fantasy, followed by the first private notated fixing
of the musical content in a shorthand and fragmented form. This ‘running’ sketch
gradually transforms into a draft score in ‘public’ handwriting, which in Mozart’s
letters and Verzeichnüss is regarded as ‘composed’. Finally comes the completed score,
with amplified inner parts, described by Mozart as ‘the writing’. It is significant that on
30 December 1780 Mozart noted to his father in relation to Idomeneo; ‘I must finish
now, because I’ve got to write at breakneck speed – everything’s composed – but not
written yet.’ These two stages are often identifiable by different colours of ink and
emphatically disprove the theory that everything was composed by Mozart ‘in his
head’.
Among other successful and well-focused treatments of major issues is John
Irving’s entry ‘rhetoric’, defined here as ‘the art of persuasion in oratory’. Arising
from appropriate reference to Mattheson and Forkel comes a further crucial question.
Did Mozart know or care about such theoretical constructs, given the practical and
pragmatic concerns associated with making a living from composition? Taking into
account Leopold Mozart’s Violinschule, Irving deduces that Wolfgang ‘would have
informally absorbed from his father’s instruction a certain amount of the intellectual
background of composition within which rhetoric played an important
contemporary role’.
Within the generic sphere but outside the immediate confines of high art, fits Ruth
Halliwell’s fine account of eighteenth-century travel. She claims that an awareness of
its distinctive conditions is essential to an understanding of the lives of those involved
and that modern-day assumptions are fundamentally unhelpful. Halliwell illuminates
such diverse issues as social differentiation of travellers, the interlinked choices of
vehicles, horses and coachmen, together with river travel. The quality of eighteenth-
century accommodation depended on the vested interests of postillions and
innkeepers. She also ranges over the packing and securing of luggage, negotiation of
customs and disruptions to health. There are many general hints here about
insightful interpretation of travel correspondence, not least that ‘the alert,
resourceful, phlegmatic and well-disposed personality as opposed to the disorganised
or easily discontented one was a more necessary precondition of a positive
experience’. Well-focused articles on cities such as London (McVeigh), Salzburg
(Eisen), Prague (Smaczny) and Vienna (Morrow) help to flesh out the contemporary
social, political and musical landscape.

© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

130 BOOK REVIEWS

In many ways it is the expertly crafted generic articles that make the book so
valuable. For example, ‘patronage’ (DeNora), ‘performance practice’ (Eisen) and
‘sources for Mozart’s life and works’ (Eisen), are all accessible and very much to the
point. The articles on people particularly benefit from the clear editorial policy of
cross-referencing and are generous and informative in their scope. The entry ‘Haydn’
(Wyn Jones), for example, brilliantly encapsulates the relationship of the two
composers in a way that has not previously been achieved so succinctly. Numerous
Viennese mutual acquaintances of the two composers are listed and there is a useful
assessment and comparison of their respective careers. ‘Salieri’ (Rice) draws out the
most significant facts that informed their relationship, notably that ‘Mozart remained
below Salieri in the court hierarchy, where the principle of seniority was rarely
violated’. In the little world of the Viennese court theatres, jealousy, backbiting
and intrigues were part of everyday life. The words of Salieri’s student Anselm
Hüttenbrenner, ‘of Mozart he always spoke with the most extraordinary respect’ are
balanced with another of his remarks that ‘where he could detect a weakness in
Mozart he pointed it out to his students’. As so often within the pages of this
Encyclopaedia, a few paragraphs contrive to delineate complex situations in an
accessible way. ‘Joseph II, Joseph(in)ism’ (Beales) is an essential introduction to
Vienna’s political background, drawing special attention to Joseph’s musical
influence:

We may regret that Mozart wrote no opera serie between Idomeneo and La
Clemenza di Tito [...] and that he wrote no large-scale church music during the
reign except the Mass in C minor [...]. But the Emperor personally engaged Da
Ponte as librettist and encouraged the writing and production of Mozart’s Le
Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan Tutte. In the case of Figaro he stretched
one point to allow the text to be sung at all.

The Encyclopaedia’s generally high quality of discourse extends to entries on

musical subjects, the generic articles (‘chamber music’, ‘sonatas’, ‘symphonies’ and
so on) often skilfully interweaving reception history within the narrative. Thus we
read at the end of ‘symphonies’ (Keefe), that the ‘Jupiter’ symphony ‘quickly
established itself as a classic, a work shattering and exalted in equal measure and a
climactic moment in musical history, revealing “all that music has achieved up to this
time, and what it will do nearly a hundred years later, according to Georges de Saint-
Foix”’. The beginning of the article ‘ballets’ (Bruce Alan Brown) sets an overall
context most effectively by citing a quotation from Constanze Mozart within Michael
Kelly’s memoirs that ‘great as his genius was, he was an enthusiast in dancing, and
often said that taste lay in that art, rather than in music’. Entries on the operas are
generously proportioned and tailored to each individual work. For example, the ten
pages on Entführung aus dem Serail, Die (Branscombe) address in succession: the topos
of the generous Turk; Bretzner’s libretto; the composition; Mozart’s score; synopsis
and music; premiere and performance history. The writing here reflects a holistic
approach that is the hallmark of modern Mozart scholarship and is an important
characteristic of the whole Encyclopaedia.
The appendices add enormous value to the volume, boasting the most up-to-date
Mozart worklist, as well as a list of Mozart movies (theatrical releases), Mozart operas
on DVD and video, Mozart organisations and Mozart websites. And how wonderful
also to have within the main body of the text the article ‘kitsch’ (Jary), defined as ‘a

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 Book Reviews 131

buzz word, coined in the 1870s, that is hard to define and even harder to set limits for’.
The limits of good taste can no longer be established, as exemplified by

the rococo dolls and china figures à la Mozart offered for sale in Austria and
elsewhere, Austrian TV’s 1985 advertisement ‘Mozart with the ice-cream
cornet’, Leherb’s poster to promote Austrian tourism in the 1980s (showing the
Wunderkind roaring through the ether on a motorbike, woollen shawl flapping
behind), and the widespread use of his name in the confectionery, cheese,
spirits, clothing and tobacco industries.

How fortunate we are today to have this indispensable Encyclopaedia to put into vivid
perspective every conceivable aspect of Mozart and his music, past and present.
Colin Lawson
Royal College of Music

Mozart and His Operas. David Cairns. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles: University of
California Press. 2006. xiv + 290 pp. 0-520-22898-7. Words about Mozart: Essays
in Honour of Stanley Sadie. Edited by Dorothea Link with Judith Nagley.
Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 2005. xvi + 252 pp. 0-85115-794-7.
David Cairns’s elegantly written study Mozart and His Operas sets out to do what mere
scholarship cannot do: to explain why Mozart matters as a musical dramatist. His
personal passion for the subject is clear throughout, yet the book is carefully and
objectively written, informed by scholarship but explicitly intended for musicians
and amateurs rather than academics. Cairns acknowledges the value of context, but
– and this is perhaps the central thrust of his critique – the delineation of this
background merely serves to underscore the unique quality of Mozart’s genius: the
appreciation of a Paisiello, a Cimarosa or a Sarti is all very well, but this need not
inhibit one from acknowledging that Mozart’s music left theirs ‘almost immeasurably
far behind’. It is this overt acknowledgement of unparalleled genius that defines the
conservative stance of the book, the tone of which is set by the frequent use of
descriptive terms such as ‘ecstatic’, ‘exquisite’, ‘transcendent’ and ‘sublime’. In order
to get the measure of Mozart’s profound insight as a dramatist, Cairns as often turns
to Shakespeare as to other composers.
Each of the mature operas receives a substantial discussion, framed by a succinct
biographical narrative giving details of the composer’s other activities. In the case
of Idomeneo, Cairns draws fruitfully upon Mozart’s lengthy and revealing
correspondence with his father, emphasising the extent to which craftsmanship,
common sense and sheer hard work underpinned his achievements. Overall the
coverage is well balanced, though Mozart’s contributions to revivals of his own works
receive less attention than they might, a significant omission perhaps only in the case
of Don Giovanni. The 1788 Vienna version, at least in the case of Elvira’s scena,
develops the character to new heights. Interwoven with the historical and critical
narrative, and very effectively too, are elements of recent reception history, critiques of
memorable moments in productions of the operas as witnessed by Cairns during his
long and distinguished career as a music critic.
At times one has the distinct sense that Cairns sees himself as a defender of these
works, especially when a mildly unfavourable scholarly or critical consensus on a

© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies