Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke: Serie X, Supplement; Werkgruppe 33: Dokumentation der Autographen Uberlieferung; Abteilung 2: Wasserzeichen-Katalog.

Rice, John A.

For several decades, Alan Tyson has explored Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's autograph manuscripts and the paper on which they were written, elegantly interpreting the results of his research in a series of important articles (most of them gathered together in Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987]). Tyson's work has crucially affected Mozart scholarship, of course, but his influence goes far beyond that. His clarity of thought and his methodological rigor have helped to raise the study of music manuscripts to a new level of precision. This is partly because Tyson has always been willing to share not only the results of his research but also the techniques that he has developed or refined in order to accomplish the research. (The two are in any case so tightly knit that it would be difficult if not impossible to separate them.) A great teacher, Tyson brings readers along with him on his investigations, explaining his terminology and his reasoning so carefully and clearly that readers can apply what they have learned to other manuscripts, composers, and problems.

Tyson's catalog of watermarks in Mozart's autograph scores, published as a supplement to the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, is yet another product of his willingness and ability to share the tools of his research as well as the results. The two-volume set includes (in vol. 1) an introduction, a brief commentary on each of the paper types used by Mozart in his autographs, a fully documented list of 107 watermarks, and (in vol. 2) illustrations of all the watermarks at what appears to be actual size.

The introduction is partly a German version of chapter 1 of Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores. It begins with an explanation of the principal elements of papermaking in the eighteenth century, deriving from these elements the characteristic features of handmade paper (the "mold side" and the "felt side") and of watermarks: chain-lines, "twins," mirror images, and so forth. Various techniques developed by Tyson for the measuring and describing of watermarks are introduced. Many eighteenth-century Italian watermarks include three crescent moons in a row. Tyson explains how to use "selenometry" - a term he derived from the Greek word for moon - to differentiate crescent-moon watermarks. The introduction ends with lists of the few autographs that Tyson was unable to consult and the few that do not contain watermarks.

In the commentary that follows, Tyson mentions the salient features of each paper type and discusses the periods and places in which Mozart used it, carefully differentiating fact from speculation.

The heart of Tyson's work is entitled "Die Wasserzeichen Nachweise" (The watermark documentation). This is a catalog of the 107 watermarks arranged chronologically according to the date when Mozart began using paper in which a particular watermark appears. Tyson has assigned a number to each watermark and a letter (A or B) to each of the twin versions. When, as frequently happened, Mozart used more than one kind of paper around the same time, the paper that Mozart used first is listed first. The chronological ordering is sometimes problematic because, while we frequently know when Mozart completed a work (especially after 1783), we much more rarely know when he began one. An index of works (arranged according to Kochel numbers) lists all the watermarks that appear in a particular score; this allows us to "reconstruct" a manuscript that the catalog has divided according to paper type. For example, we learn from the index that the autograph score of Die Zauberflote contains twelve different paper types, including one (no. 62) that Mozart started to use in 1782.

The entry for each watermark begins with that watermark's number, followed by the date and place to which Tyson attributes Mozart's first use of the paper in which the watermark appears. Under a miniature depiction of both twins is a list of all the works in which the watermark appears. For each work Tyson specifies which leaves contain the watermark in question and gives the location of the autograph, using RISM sigla.

Volume 2 contains illustrations of all the watermarks, with twins on facing pages. Tyson has reconstructed the "sheet-watermark"; that is, the watermark as it appeared on the large sheet produced by the papermaker. That sheet was subsequently folded in half and then cut, producing two bifolia, each of which contains two quadrants of the original sheet. A single leaf of a Mozart autograph will contain only one quarter of the sheet-watermark reconstructed by Tyson, who marks with two short parallel vertical lines the place where the sheet was folded and with a horizontal dotted line the place where the sheet was cut. He numbers each quadrant 1-4. Solid vertical lines represent the chain lines, whose intersections with images and words are important in differentiating otherwise very similar watermarks.

It is difficult to think of a project with which Tyson's can be fairly compared. Some excellent studies of eighteenth-century musical repertories have included lists of watermarks or large numbers of illustrations of watermarks. Denes Bartha and Laszlo Somfai, Haydn als Opernkapellmeister (Budapest: Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1960) includes, as an appendix prepared by Dorrit Somfai-Revesz, a list of about three hundred paper types represented in operatic manuscripts from Eszterhaza; but only a relatively few watermarks are illustrated. Charles H. Sherman and T. Donley Thomas, Johann Michael Haydn (1737-1801): A Chronological Thematic Catalogue of His Works (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1993) illustrates 162 watermarks that appear in manuscripts of Michael Haydn's works; but the illustrations are generally limited to a single central image. Neither catalog transforms watermarks, by means of systematic study, into a tool for further research. After Tyson, these earlier approaches to watermarks in music manuscripts seem somewhat casual; one gets the impression from these books that a watermark is just an image: a stag, a coat of arms, a row of crescent moons. Twins, chain-lines, quadrants, the problem of differentiating one row of moons from another do not seem to have been of much concern to those studying the operatic repertory at Eszterhaza and the works of Michael Haydn. One wonders whether their work on watermarks will be of much use to future scholars, and one returns to Tyson's catalog with renewed admiration.

JOHN A. RICE University of Houston