Mozart's compositional method: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:53, 25 May 2025

Latest revision as of 15:54, 19 August 2025

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==Use of a keyboard==

[[File:Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the age of 13 in Verona, 1770.jpg|thumb|1770 Verona portrait of Mozart, which shows the composer playing a [[harpsichord]]]]

Mozart sometimes used a keyboard to work out his musical thoughts. This can be deduced from his letters and other biographical material.<ref>This point is made by the authors of the [[Cornell University]] website "Mozart and the keyboard culture of his time", which also offers digital images of the letters in question. See [httphttps://rmc.library.cornell.edu/mozart/myth/TellTale_Letters.htm "Tell-Tale Letters"].</ref> For instance, on 1 August 1781, Mozart wrote to his father [[Leopold Mozart|Leopold]] concerning his living arrangements in Vienna, where he had recently moved:

<blockquote>

My room that I'm moving to is being prepared—I'm just off now to hire a keyboard, because I can't live there until that's been delivered, especially as I've got to write just now, and there isn't a minute to be lost.<ref>Cited from {{harvnb|Konrad|2006|p=102}}</ref></blockquote>

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===The Rochlitz letter===

An important source for earlier conceptions concerning Mozart's composition method was the work of the early 19th century publisher [[Friedrich Rochlitz]]. He propagated anecdotes about Mozart that were long assumed authentic, but with more recent research are now widely doubted.{{sfn|Keefe|2006}} Among other things, Rochlitz published a letter,<ref>''[[Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung]]'' in 1815, vol. 17, pp. 561–566; {{harvnb|Konrad|2006|p=101}}</ref> purporting to be by Mozart but now considered fraudulent,<ref>The [[Cornell University]] website "Mozart and the keyboard culture of his time" offers an image of the original published version of the letter, as well as one of the salient reasons why it is considered fraudulent: it has Mozart saying "the letter I wrote to my father-in-law, to request the hand of my present wife"; [[Constanze Mozart]]'s father Fridolin Weber died before Mozart ever began courting her. See [httphttps://rmc.library.cornell.edu/mozart/myth/Forged_Letter_pic3.htm "A Forged Letter"].</ref> concerning his method of composition. This letter was taken as evidence concerning two points considered dubious by modern scholars. One is the idea that Mozart composed in a kind of passive mental process, letting the ideas simply come to him:

<blockquote>When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come I know not, nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me, I retain in ... memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me, how I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it, that is to say, agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various instruments, &c.<ref>The letter is quoted as it appears in {{harvnb|Zaslaw|1994}}.</ref></blockquote>