Leopold-Mozart-Werkverzeichnis (LMV).

Alexander, Peter M.

Leopold-Mozart-Werkverzeichnis (LMV). By Cliff Eisen, with assistance from Christian Broy. (Beitrage zur Leopold-Mozart-Forschung, vol. 4.) Augsburg: Whiner, 2010. [271 p. ISBN 9783896397577. [euro]49,80.] Music examples, illustrations.

Leopold Mozart is both one of the most familiar and one of the least known figures in music history. He is familiar through the life and career of his son, and through the extensive correspondence that lays bare the family drama that unfolded as Wolfgang was growing up. But apart from a couple of trivial works, he until recently remained relatively' unknown as a musician and composer.

The correspondence and other documentary' records of the Mozart family show Leopold to have been a complex and ambiguous figure. Well educated for his times. he could be arrogant, suspicious, mercenary, and self-pitying, but he was also in his way a loving father and husband, a keen observer of his world, a gifted musician and teacher, and above all a conscientious and thoughtful guide For his phenomenal children. With such a complex personality, it is no surprise that Leopold has been a target for historians, or that his reputation has changed drastically over time. Already in the early twentieth cen wry, Hermann Abort described this phenomenon when he wrote:

 In their desire to idealize everything to do with their hero,
 most older biographers, headed by Jahn, turned [Leopold] into
 the ideal father of a youthful genius, painting a romantic
 portrait of his character that does not correspond to the facts.
 More recently, the pendulum has swung too far in the other
 direction, and the venerable patriarch has had to make way for
 a figure whose character is made up, in the main, of weaknesses
 such a pedantry, obstinacy, vanity, envy and petty bourgeois
 complacency, with the result that Leopold now seems very much
 to have been his son's nemesis. This curious volte-face merely
 proves how hard it is to remain objective towards the fathers
 of great men. (W. A. Mozart, trans. Steward Spencer, ed. Cliff
 Eisen [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007], 6.)

Abert's "curious volte-face" was perfectly expressed in a single sentence written in 1913 by Edward J. Dent: "Leopold Mozart, although always held up to admiration as the most devoted of fathers, has a very repellant side to his character" (Mozart's Operas: A Critical Study, 2d ed. [London: Oxford University Press, 1960], 14). From Dent on, negative appraisals of Leopold's character remained the norm throughout the twentieth century, reaching an extreme in Maynard Solomon's psycho-biography of the son with its references to Leopold's "erotically tinged drive to dominate," his "irrational moments," and "the depth of his delusions." (Mozart: A Life [New York: Harper Collins, 1995], 11, 214, and 215).

Of course, such negativity is partly a result of regarding Leopold only in the context of Wolfgang's life and career. To see any father through the eyes of a son trying to break free of the family is to see the "irrational moments" and the "repellant side of his character." But Leopold was not only Wolfgang's father; he was a musician of talent, an accomplished teacher, and the author of one of the most important pedagogical treatises of the eighteenth century, the Versuch einer grundlichen Violinschule. Thus it is a welcome development that more scholarship has been devoted to Leopold himself in recent decades, and it may not be a coincidence that a more balanced appraisal of his character has emerged at the same time, notably in Ruth Halliwell's The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

Cliff Eisen is one of the scholars who have devoted serious study to Leopold's life and works, from his 1986 dissertation on the symphonies ("The Symphonies of Leopold Mozart and their Relationship to the Early Symphonies of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Bibliographical and Stylistic Study" [Ph.D. diss., Cornell University]) to more recent research and published articles (see the bibliography on p. 257 of the volume under review). As a summation of his work to date, Eisen has prepared a well-grounded and thorough thematic catalog of Leopold's compositions. Based in part on his dissertation and an earlier one by D. M. Carlson on the vocal works ("The Vocal Music of Leopold Mozart (1719-1787): Authenticity, Chronology and Thematic Catalogue" [Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1976]), the volume reveals the breadth of Leopold's compositional output. But drawing on Eisen's extensive experience and knowledge, the volume is more than a listing of compositions; it becomes a thorough introduction to the composer and the scholarly issues surrounding his works.

The catalog is organized in seventeen categories covering a wide variety of genres, from sacred vocal music to symphonies, serenades, and chamber music. These categories are worth listing here, because knowledge of Leopold's compositions has rested too long on the Kindersinfonie (known as the "Toy Symphony," actually a cassation listed as in Eisen's catalog), and the Musikalische Schlittenfahrt ("Musical Sleigh Ride," In fact, Leopold was far more than the composer of amusing trifles, as the listing of catalog sections reveals:

I Masses and mass movements

II Litanies

III Smaller sacred works

IV Oratorios, sacred cantatas, applausus, singspiele and school
 dramas

V Sacred arias

VI Secular songs

VII Symphonies

VII Divertimenti, partitas. serenades, and other orchestral works

IX Solo concertos

X Dances

XI Chamber music with keyboard

XII Chamber music for strings or strings and winds

XIII Music for keyboard

XIV Miscellaneous

XV Fragments, sketches, figured bass exercises

XVI Copies and arrangements of works by other composers

XVII Teaching works [in fact one work, the Versuch]

The listing of works within each category is straightforward and easy to follow: works in most categories are numbered consecutively through the group, as in the secular songs VI:1-7. In categories I, II, and VII works are grouped and numbered by key, for example the symphonies VII:C1-4, VII:D1-29, and so forth. Each entry includes all the expected information: there is an incipit for each movement, and the movement's length is listed; there is information on dating, sources, modern editions, and scholarly references (Literally). Especially valuable to other scholars are the extensive remarks (Anmerkungen) that accompany many of the listings. With Eisen's extensive knowledge of sources and issues Of attribution, the remarks are often the most interesting and valuable part of the catalog.

Lost works that appear in eighteenth-century catalogs, and therefore have incipits, are listed in the main sequence within each category. Those that are known only from references in letters and other documents, and that therefore lack incipits, are listed at the end of each category; in the case of groups subdivided by key these works are listed with the preface "X" in place of the key, as in the symphonies VII:X1-8. The inclusion of lost works is important because there are so many of them. For example, in group VIII, seven of the thirteen listed works have been lost, and four are listed without incipit. The situation is even more extreme in the case of solo concertos (group IX): eleven of fourteen have been lost. It should be obvious that without counting all of these lost works, one would never get an accurate picture of Leopold's creative output.

Questions of authenticity among works attributed to Leopold are more thorny. This issue is addressed directly in the introduction to the catalog (pp. 11-12), and in the remarks for individual works. In the first group (Masses and Mass Movements), Eisen helpfully acids a list of doubtful works that lack authentic sources or convincing proof of Leopold Mozart's authorship, or that have other attributions ("authentische Quellen oder uberzeugende Beweise der Autorschaft Leopold Mozarts, oder sie zeigen anderslautende Zuschreibungen"; pp. 22-23), and a single offertory is identified as inauthentic ("unecht," p. 39) in the list of smaller sacred works. Even more helpful is the section of the catalog devoted to forty copies and arrangements in Leopold's hand of works by other composers (group XVI, pp. 157-77), clearly establishing their authors.

Especially vexing are problems of attribution among some of the symphonics written when Wolfgang was younger. Father and son copied each others' works; they shared copyists in Salzburg; and of course Leopold frequently corrected Wolfgang's early compositions. The well-documented confusion concerning the "Old" and "New" Lambach symphonies is a case in point (see Neal Zaslaw, Mozart's Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 127-45), but there are many other symphonies attributed to Wolfgang that are doubtful or that may be his father's work. This was the central issue taken up in Eisen's dissertation, as well as in some of his subsequent published articles ("The Symphonies of Leopold Mozart: Their Chronology, Style, and Importance for the Study of Mozart's Earliest Symphonies." Mozart Jahrbuch [1987-88]: 181-83; and "Problems of Authenticity among Mozart's Early Symphonies: the Examples of K.Anh.220 (16a) and 76 (42a)," Music and Letters 70, no. 4 [November 1989]: 505-16).

The thematic catalog of Leopold's work now provides an authoritative basis for all future consideration. of attribution. but it does not entirely supplant the thematic list of symphonies in Eisen's dissertation. Other than the Roman numeral designating the larger groups of works in the published catalog, the numbering of the symphonies is identical in both volumes. However, the dissertation includes one useful piece of information that the catalog does not: in the former, each symphony is identified as genuine, probably genuine, or uncertain by means of prefixes placed before the catalog number (* for genuine, no prefix for probably genuine, and ? for uncertain; e.g., ?Cl, *C2, ?C3, C4, etc.). This is useful information, and Mozart scholars may want to either purchase a copy of the dissertation, or consult the dissertation and write the prefixes into their copy of the catalog.

Beyond its authoritative list of Leopold's works, the catalog has other features that are valuable to scholars. The appendix includes a discussion Of the copyists represented in manuscript copies of Leopold's work. The most important copyists are discussed in some detail, and examples of their handwriting are reproduced. Because this includes copyists associated with both the Salzburg court and the Mozart family, this is a useful resource for all Mozart scholars. Also carefully documented are the watermarks found in the manuscripts.

Finally, the inclusion of the Versuch einer grundlichen Vilinschule becomes another useful resource for historians. Eisen helpfully lists early editions, authorized and unauthorized, into the early nineteenth century, and includes five contemporary reviews of the treatise from Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. Apart from the historical value of this information, these reviews are interesting reading for the historian, and make a fitting conclusion to an exemplary catalog.

PETER.R M. ALEXANDER

University of Iowa

EDITED BY STEPHEN LUTTMANN