1770) and his hapless son of the same name. Avison senior worked his way upwardsfrom a poor childhood as the son of a wait, ‘yet by the prime of his life [...] wasconsorting with the principal figures of the Newcastle social world, with respectableclergymen and land-owning gentry and nobility [...] and as early as 1761 he wasdescribing himself as a “gentleman”.’ Although he achieved a national reputation asa 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 incomefrom 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 bandmusician – and he also taught. Despite a better start in life than his father, hestruggled to remain solvent and died heavily in debt.

One gains a sense of the professional musician’s ambivalent status: a poorly paidservant or tradesman when providing a service such as playing for a function; arelatively well paid teacher (better than now) to amateurs of the nobility and gentry,and an uneasy equal with those amateurs when providing much-needed professionalstiffening 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 theprofessional instrumentalists he employed that if they wanted to be paid they mustdine with the servants; if not, they could dine with him).

Both books contain much material for the social historian, but anyone with musicalinterests will want to know what the music sounded like. Works by Charles Avison haveappeared on a number of recordings, and a CD of cello concertos by John Garth hasrecently been released to considerable acclaim. But the clarinet concertos of ThomasWright remain unpublished and unrecorded. The glee is an unknown genre for mostpeople 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 modernaudience’s interest; the music was designed for performers, not listeners. A programmethat interspersed catches and glees with anecdotes of eighteenth-century club culturemight entertain however. And anyone allowed through the doors of a so-calledgentleman’s club today can experience eighteenth-century indulgence in alcohol,tobacco (at the time of writing) and misogyny as living tradition.

Jeremy BarlowIndependent 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 bean endless source of fascination and appeal to musicians, scholars and listeners alike.Amid the whirlwind of recent activity in print this Cambridge Encyclopaedia occupiesa pre-eminent position. It covers all aspects of Mozart and his world, functioning bothas a starting point for information on specific works, people, places and concepts aswell as a summation of current thinking about Mozart. The extended articles ongenres 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 andentertaining style, representing today’s greater interest in previously unexplored

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aspects of Mozart’s life, context and reception. This is a magnificently produced anddefinitive single volume that will satisfy both the casual browser and the reader whowants 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 ofoutdated myths along the way. At the outset he asks:

What do we mean when we talk about compositional creativity, the process ofmusical 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 byscholarly treatment? The questions are elementary but the answers arecomplicated.

He then proceeds to identify four typical phases. Mozart concentrated on an idea forthe work and the engagement of his fantasy, followed by the first private notated fixingof the musical content in a shorthand and fragmented form. This ‘running’ sketchgradually transforms into a draft score in ‘public’ handwriting, which in Mozart’sletters 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 on30 December 1780 Mozart noted to his father in relation to Idomeneo; ‘I must finishnow, because I’ve got to write at breakneck speed – everything’s composed – but notwritten yet.’ These two stages are often identifiable by different colours of ink andemphatically disprove the theory that everything was composed by Mozart ‘in hishead’.

Among other successful and well-focused treatments of major issues is JohnIrving’s entry ‘rhetoric’, defined here as ‘the art of persuasion in oratory’. Arisingfrom appropriate reference to Mattheson and Forkel comes a further crucial question.Did Mozart know or care about such theoretical constructs, given the practical andpragmatic concerns associated with making a living from composition? Taking intoaccount Leopold Mozart’s Violinschule, Irving deduces that Wolfgang ‘would haveinformally absorbed from his father’s instruction a certain amount of the intellectualbackground of composition within which rhetoric played an importantcontemporary role’.

Within the generic sphere but outside the immediate confines of high art, fits RuthHalliwell’s fine account of eighteenth-century travel. She claims that an awareness ofits distinctive conditions is essential to an understanding of the lives of those involvedand that modern-day assumptions are fundamentally unhelpful. Halliwell illuminatessuch diverse issues as social differentiation of travellers, the interlinked choices ofvehicles, horses and coachmen, together with river travel. The quality of eighteenth-century accommodation depended on the vested interests of postillions andinnkeepers. She also ranges over the packing and securing of luggage, negotiation ofcustoms and disruptions to health. There are many general hints here aboutinsightful interpretation of travel correspondence, not least that ‘the alert,resourceful, phlegmatic and well-disposed personality as opposed to the disorganisedor easily discontented one was a more necessary precondition of a positiveexperience’. Well-focused articles on cities such as London (McVeigh), Salzburg(Eisen), Prague (Smaczny) and Vienna (Morrow) help to flesh out the contemporarysocial, political and musical landscape.

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

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

The Encyclopaedia’s generally high quality of discourse extends to entries onmusical subjects, the generic articles (‘chamber music’, ‘sonatas’, ‘symphonies’ andso on) often skilfully interweaving reception history within the narrative. Thus weread at the end of ‘symphonies’ (Keefe), that the ‘Jupiter’ symphony ‘quicklyestablished itself as a classic, a work shattering and exalted in equal measure and aclimactic moment in musical history, revealing “all that music has achieved up to thistime, 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 overallcontext most effectively by citing a quotation from Constanze Mozart within MichaelKelly’s memoirs that ‘great as his genius was, he was an enthusiast in dancing, andoften said that taste lay in that art, rather than in music’. Entries on the operas aregenerously proportioned and tailored to each individual work. For example, the tenpages on Entführung aus dem Serail, Die (Branscombe) address in succession: the toposof the generous Turk; Bretzner’s libretto; the composition; Mozart’s score; synopsisand music; premiere and performance history. The writing here reflects a holisticapproach that is the hallmark of modern Mozart scholarship and is an importantcharacteristic of the whole Encyclopaedia.

The appendices add enormous value to the volume, boasting the most up-to-dateMozart worklist, as well as a list of Mozart movies (theatrical releases), Mozart operason DVD and video, Mozart organisations and Mozart websites. And how wonderfulalso to have within the main body of the text the article ‘kitsch’ (Jary), defined as ‘a

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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 andelsewhere, Austrian TV’s 1985 advertisement ‘Mozart with the ice-creamcornet’, Leherb’s poster to promote Austrian tourism in the 1980s (showing theWunderkind roaring through the ether on a motorbike, woollen shawl flappingbehind), 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 vividperspective every conceivable aspect of Mozart and his music, past and present.

Colin LawsonRoyal College of Music

Mozart and His Operas. David Cairns. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press. 2006. xiv + 290 pp. 0-520-22898-7. Words about Mozart: Essaysin 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 merescholarship cannot do: to explain why Mozart matters as a musical dramatist. Hispersonal passion for the subject is clear throughout, yet the book is carefully andobjectively written, informed by scholarship but explicitly intended for musiciansand amateurs rather than academics. Cairns acknowledges the value of context, but– and this is perhaps the central thrust of his critique – the delineation of thisbackground merely serves to underscore the unique quality of Mozart’s genius: theappreciation of a Paisiello, a Cimarosa or a Sarti is all very well, but this need notinhibit one from acknowledging that Mozart’s music left theirs ‘almost immeasurablyfar behind’. It is this overt acknowledgement of unparalleled genius that defines theconservative stance of the book, the tone of which is set by the frequent use ofdescriptive terms such as ‘ecstatic’, ‘exquisite’, ‘transcendent’ and ‘sublime’. In orderto get the measure of Mozart’s profound insight as a dramatist, Cairns as often turnsto Shakespeare as to other composers.

Each of the mature operas receives a substantial discussion, framed by a succinctbiographical narrative giving details of the composer’s other activities. In the caseof Idomeneo, Cairns draws fruitfully upon Mozart’s lengthy and revealingcorrespondence with his father, emphasising the extent to which craftsmanship,common sense and sheer hard work underpinned his achievements. Overall thecoverage is well balanced, though Mozart’s contributions to revivals of his own worksreceive less attention than they might, a significant omission perhaps only in the caseof 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 criticalnarrative, and very effectively too, are elements of recent reception history, critiques ofmemorable moments in productions of the operas as witnessed by Cairns during hislong and distinguished career as a music critic.

At times one has the distinct sense that Cairns sees himself as a defender of theseworks, especially when a mildly unfavourable scholarly or critical consensus on a

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