By the end of the eighteenth century, the string quartet had achieved a status beyond that of most other instrumental genres, a status that made it appealing as a hook on which to hang historical reputations. And this, in turn, sometimes meant creating convenient histories – or, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, asserting the importance of ‘great men’, their originality and independence of mind, their historical leadership, in whatever field:

Idomeneo, re di Creta, K366 (Idomeneus, King of Crete). Dramma per musica in three acts, K366, libretto by Giambattista Varesco. First performance: Munich, court theatre, 29 January 1781. Idomeneo bridges Mozart's final period of employment in Salzburg and his years in Vienna. It was the principal production of the Munich Carnival season in 1781 at the court theatre of Karl Theodor, former Elector Palatinate in Mannheim and since 1778 Elector of Bavaria. Idomeneo was well received, and the Elector was warm in his praise (Mozart reports him saying at rehearsal, ‘Who could believe that such great things could be hidden in so small a head?’). Nevertheless it seems to have been performed only three times, on 29 January and 5 and 12 February 1781. There is no record of a revival in Munich, where a performing score (not the autograph) and performing materials survive. Nor, as Mozart already hoped on his extended visit to Mannheim in 1777–8, did Karl Theodor offer him a job. Despite a single revival in Vienna in 1786, what is without question Mozart's finest serious opera was to him as much a source of frustration as of satisfaction.

1. Origin and composition

2. The subject

3. Synopsis

4. Genre, music and characterization

5. Revision and reception

Origin and composition

The commission for Idomeneo may have been obtained by the veteran tenor Anton Raaff, who had known Mozart since his 1777 Mannheim visit, and who took the title role.

Magic Flute, The. See Zauberflöte, Die

Mandini, Stefano (1750–c.1810). A leading Italian baritone in Vienna in the 1780s, praised for the beautiful, unforced quality of his voice, Mandini probably made his debut in the city in Domenico Cimarosa'sL'italiana in Londra (5 May 1783). He played a number of prominent operatic roles in Vienna in the 1780s, to considerable critical acclaim, including Mingone in Giuseppe Sarti's Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode (28 May 1783), Count Almaviva in Giovanni Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia (13 Aug. 1783) and Giorgio in La contadina di spirito (6 Apr. 1785), where he performed alongside Francesco Benucci. On 1 May 1786, he sang Count Almaviva in the premiere of Le nozze di Figaro at the Burgtheater (again with Benucci, who sang Figaro). A few months earlier (on 28 Nov. 1785), he was a soloist at the same venue in two Mozart ensembles performed at the premiere of La villanella rapita by Francesco Bianchi – the quartet for soprano, tenor, two basses and orchestra ‘Dite almeno, in che mancai’, K479, and the trio for soprano, tenor, bass and orchestra ‘Mandina amabile’, K480. Mandini left Vienna for Naples in 1788, after a grand farewell concert on 15 February 1788. He subsequently moved on to Paris in 1789 – where he reprised the role of Almaviva in Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia – then to Venice in 1794–5.

simon p. keefe

D. Link, The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783–1792 (Oxford, 1998)

Habsburg monarchy. See Austria, Austrian, Austrian Monarchy

Haffner family. Salzburg family of factors, whose business encompassed banking, haulage and the import and export of goods for merchants. Under Siegmund Haffner the elder (b. 1699; d. 12 Jan. 1772) the firm reached its zenith, and was known throughout Germany, Austria and Italy. Siegmund was mayor from 1768 to 1772 and left enormous wealth. He was married twice – from 3 February 1733 to Anna Elisabeth Kaltenhauser (b. 1712; d. 25 Dec. 1744), and from 3 August 1745 to Eleonore Mezger (b. 1716; d. 2 June 1764). From these marriages five daughters and a son reached adulthood, the daughters marrying into mercantile families. Mozart wrote music for two of the children: Maria Elisabeth (b. 24 Oct. 1753; d. 1 Nov. 1781) and Siegmund the younger (b. 30 Sept. 1756; d. 24 June 1787).

When Maria Elisabeth married Franz Xaver Späth on 22 July 1776, Mozart wrote the ‘Haffner’ serenade, K250 (plus the march K249), in celebration. It was performed on the eve of the wedding at the Haffners’ summer residence by Salzburg's Loreto convent. On 9 July 1782 Siegmund the younger was ennobled, and Mozart wrote what became the ‘Haffner’ symphony, K385, to mark the event. By now living in Vienna, he completed it in two weeks. It had a march (possibly K408, No. 2), and may originally have had two minuets, though only one survives. Later Mozart added flutes and clarinets, and dropped the march, leaving the four movements that now comprise the ‘Haffner’ symphony.

Wagenseil, Georg Christoph (b. Vienna, 29 Jan. 1715; d. Vienna, 1 Mar. 1777). A court composer in Vienna from 1739 until his death, organist at Empress Elizabeth Christine's private chapel (1741–50) and court keyboard instructor (from 1749), Wagenseil was a renowned composer of operatic, vocal, orchestral and chamber works. His prolific instrumental output alone totalled over 100 symphonies, 100 concertos and 200 works for solo keyboard. Wagenseil's prowess on the keyboard was widely praised, C. F. D. Schubart citing his ‘extraordinary expressive power’. Mozart learned a Wagenseil scherzo on 24 January 1761 (as reported by Leopold Mozart in Nannerl Mozart's music book), performed a Wagenseil concerto for Empress Maria Theresia on his first trip to Vienna in 1762, and played other keyboard works by him at court in London two years later. According to Friedrich Schlichtegroll's biography of Mozart in his Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1791 (Gotha, 1793), Wagenseil was present at the Vienna performance and may have turned pages for Mozart. On a later trip to Vienna, Leopold explained to his wife (30 Jan.–3 Feb. 1768): ‘I was told that all the clavier-players and composers in Vienna were opposed to our advancement, with the sole exception of Wagenseil, who, however, as he was ill at home, could not help us or contribute anything to our advantage.’

simon p. keefe

Austria

Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Schwarzstrasse 26, A-5020 Salzburg; telephone 662 88 940 13, fax 662 88 24 19, website: www.mozarteum.at

In addition to a list of concerts and details on museums, this site includes a useful online bibliography of writings about Mozart, especially from the 1990s on; the bibliography can be searched by author, topic or Köchel number.

Mozart-Gemeinde Niederösterreich, Stuwer-Str. 1-3/1/1, A-1020 Wien

Mozartgemeinde Wien, Amalien-Str. 29a, A-11300 Wien; telephone 43 1 876 7201

Neue Mozart-Ausgabe; website www.nma.at

The official website of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe. In addition to brief news items, the site includes a database that lists the locations of Mozart's autographs, a summary of the edition and information on Mozart librettos as well as links to other sites.

France

Cercle Mozart Strasbourg, 5, rue de Londres, F-67000 Strasbourg

Germany

Deutsche Mozart-Gesellschaft, Frauentorstrasse 30, D-86152 Augsburg; telephone 49 0821 518588, fax 49 0821 157228, email: info@Deutsche-Mozart-Gesellschaft.de, website: www.mozartgesellschaft.de

The Deutsche Mozart-Gesellschaft sponsors concerts and lectures and, additionally, published a useful but accessible scholarly periodical, Acta Mozartiana.

Mozartgemeinde Arnsberg, Kettelburgstr. 23, 59759 Arnsberg; telephone 49 02932 35254, fax 49 02932 52187

Mozart Gemeinde Augsburg e.V., Musikalienhandlung A. Böhm & Sohn, Ludwigstr. 15, 86152 Augsburg; telephone 49 5 02 84-25

Associazione Mozart Itali www.mozartitalia.org

A useful and attractive site including accounts of the association's activities, information about Mozart, sound clips, a picture gallery and general Mozart news. Email: AMI@MozartItalia.org.

Mozart 2006 www.mozart2006.at

A site sponsored by the city of Salzburg to promote Mozart celebrations during the year marking the 250th anniversary of his birth. A monthly calendar describes a series of events planned for 2006 and a forum is available for those who register.

The Mozart Project www.frontiernet.net/tilde'sboerner/mozart/index.html

An extensive site with information on Mozart's works, a biography, selected essays and a bibliography as well as a list of links. The information is sometimes dated, relying on older scholarship; nevertheless it gives a great deal of useful information.

Openmozart.net www.openmozart.net

Another extensive site with a catalogue, notes on Mozart's works, a biography, a list of Mozart books, images and links to other sites. It also includes a message board where Mozart scholars and aficionados can post and reply to messages of common interest.

OperaGlass Mozart http://rick.stanford.edu/opera/Mozart/main.html

This site includes a complete list of Mozart's operas with detailed information and librettos for selected works.

This worklist primarily reports on Mozart's completed works, with additional information on works traditionally attributed to him but lacking authentic sources, and works attributed to him that are by other composers. Works are listed by the numbers assigned them in Ludwig Ritter von Köchel's Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Tonwerke Wolfgang Amadé Mozarts (Leipzig, 1862). Although many numbers were revised in subsequent editions by Alfred Einstein (1937, 3rd edition) and Franz Giegling, Alexander Weinmann and Gerd Sievers (1964, 6th edition), Mozart's works continue to be known chiefly by Köchel's original numbers, regardless of their revised order in the chronology. We have therefore decided to retain the original numbers except where a work is not listed in the 1862 catalogue; in those cases we have generally taken the number from the sixth edition. Regardless, Köchel is well cross-referenced and any number will eventually lead a user to the full entry for a work.

The dating of Mozart's works is based on a variety of sources. In many instances, his autographs are both signed and dated or there is unequivocal evidence in the family letters or contemporaneous documents; in those cases we have given a place and date without qualification. The same is true of works listed in Mozart's own thematic catalogue, which he began in February 1784 and continued for the rest of his life (Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke vom Monath Febrario 1784 bis Monath 1; facsimile edition, ed. A. Rosenthal and A. Tyson, London, 1991).

Calvesi, Teresa (fl. 1776–1801). Italian soprano. Her first known appearance was in Genoa in 1776. At Easter 1785 she and her husband Vincenzo were engaged for the court theatre in Vienna. Although Zinzendorf judged her as ‘not bad’ at her debut on 18 April 1785, her career in Vienna did not blossom. In 1788 she accompanied her husband to Naples on a year's leave of absence, but she did not sing there. She did not return with him to Vienna but pursued her own, apparently successful, career in Palermo, Vicenza, London and elsewhere in Italy until at least 1801.

dorothea link

Calzabigi, Ranieri (de’) (b. Livorno, 23 Dec. 1714, d. Naples,? 12 or 13 July 1795), Italian librettist. The Mozart family were in Vienna for performances of his and Gluck's ‘reform’ operas Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and Alceste (father and son only, 1767–8), but seem not to have encountered Calzabigi directly. The libretto of Mozart's La finta giardiniera, written for Munich, was long thought to be by Calzabigi, with revisions by Marco Coltellini, but this attribution is mistaken, based on confusion with concurrent performances in Munich of Antonio Tozzi's resetting of Orfeo (as revised by Coltellini). Neither the Munich libretto of La finta giardiniera, nor the original one for Rome (1774, set by Pasquale Anfossi) is signed, but Giuseppe Petrosellini has been suggested as the actual librettist based on mention (by the ‘Interessati’) in the Rome libretto of another opera by that author.

Eberl, Anton (Franz Josef) (b. Vienna, 13 June 1765; d. Vienna, 11 Mar. 1807). Austrian pianist and composer. A child prodigy, Eberl gave private piano recitals at the age of eight; his first public recital in Vienna took place on 9 March 1784 and his first stage work, Die Marchande des Modes (1787), is said to have been praised by Gluck. It is sometimes claimed that Eberl was Mozart's pupil although there is no evidence to support this assertion. Beginning in 1788, some of Eberl's piano pieces began to appear under Mozart's name, including variations on Ignaz Umlauf's Zu Steffen sprach im Traume and a piano sonata in C minor. In the winter of 1795–6 he toured with Constanze Mozart and her sister Aloysia Lange, performing piano concertos and piano quartets, possibly by Mozart. He returned to Vienna in the early 1800s where for a while he was considered Beethoven's equal, especially as a composer of concertos and symphonies.

cliff eisen

Eberlin, Johann Ernst (b. Jettingen, Bavaria, 27 Mar. 1702; d. Salzburg, 19/21 June 1762). Composer and music director. Eberlin, director of the Salzburg court music during Leopold Mozart's early tenure as a court violinist, had a life and career that is in some ways strikingly reminiscent of his younger compatriot's.

Mozart's enduring popularity, among music lovers as a composer and among music historians as a subject for continued study, lies at the heart of this book: even now, 250 years after his birth, Mozart remains an iconic figure in western society. One fortunate result of this – fortunate for both the music lover and the musicologist – is that new ‘facts’ about his life, new sources for his music, and new interpretations of his works are a regular feature of Mozart performance and the Mozart literature. As much as for any other composer, then, we constantly renew our relationship with Mozart, through listening and reading and thinking.

There have been some distinguished Mozart compendia in the past: H. C. Robbins Landon and Donald Mitchell's Mozart Companion of 1956 springs immediately to mind; so too does Landon's Mozart Compendium of 1990. The first of these coincided with the two hundredth anniversary of Mozart's birth, the second with the two hundredth anniversary of his death. The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia celebrates Mozart's two hundred and fiftieth birthday but it differs from those two volumes in significant ways. The Mozart Companion was a collection of extended, often brilliant, essays, organized by genre; it was not the volume's intention to give an account of Mozart's life or the contexts in which he worked. The Mozart Compendium, on the other hand, paid much more attention to Mozart's life and times but included much shorter essays on the music itself.

Paisiello, Giovanni (b. Roccaforzata, near Taranto, 9 May 1740; d. Naples, 5 June 1816). Famed above all for his opere buffe, Paisiello worked for most of his life in Naples, aside from eight years in St Petersburg (1776–84) and two in Vienna (1802–4). He met Mozart in Naples in mid-1770, in Turin in early 1771 and in Vienna in 1784 on his way back to Naples from Russia. On the latter occasion, he attended a private concert given by Mozart and his pupil Barbara von Ployer (13 June 1784); Mozart duly reciprocated by going to the premiere of Paisiello's Il re Teodoro in Venezia (23 August) at the Burgtheater. (The opera was performed another thirteen times before the end of the year.) In his ‘Reminiscences’ (1826) Michael Kelly, the original Don Basilio and Don Curzio in Le nozze di Figaro and a popular singer in Vienna in the 1780s, recalled one of the meetings between Paisiello and Mozart in 1784: ‘it was gratifying to witness the satisfaction which they appeared to feel by becoming acquainted; the esteem which they had for each other was well known’.

Paisiello was easily the most popular operatic composer at the Viennese court theatres during Mozart's decade in the city (1781–91) – he had over a hundred more performances in this period than Salieri, his nearest rival.

This list of important video recordings of Mozart operas is selective; it includes the majority of productions from major opera houses and festivals, made-for-TV productions and theatrical releases but is by no means complete. Most of these recordings are readily available from a variety of sources including major record stores, opera houses and, in particular, from online dealers in opera video. Given the vagaries of cataloguing and the lack of a standardized format for describing the details of video productions, only the basic information is given here. Nevertheless, individual productions can easily be found from the sources mentioned above.

Apollo et Hyacinthus

1983, dir. Claus Helmut Drese, cond. Helmut Müller-Brühl, Cappella Clementina; singers include Manfred Hohenleitner, Cedric Rossdeutscher, Allan Bergius, Panito Iconomou, Michel Lecocq (recorded at Schloss Augustusburg, Brühl)

1991, dir. Vittorio Patané, cond. Peter Schneider, Münchner Rundfunkorchester; singers include Claes H. Ahnsjö, Caroline Maria Petrig, Julie Kaufmann, Daphne Evangelatos, Birgit Calm (recorded at the Cuvilliestheater, München)

Bastien und Bastienne

1954, dir.?, cond. Albert Kaiser, Collegium Musicum Basel; singers include Hans Jonelli, Heidi Bumbrunn, Mogens Wedel

1963, dir. Christopher Muir, cond. Clive Douglas; singers include George Hegan, Eunice McGowan, Keithe Neilson

1989, dir. Walter Berry, cond. Niksa Bareza, Haydn-Sinfonietta Wien; singers include Rhonda Ingle, Franz Supper, Johannes Jokel (recorded at the Gmundner Festpiele, 1989)

Abduction, The. See Entführung aus dem Serail, Die

Abel, Carl Friedrich (b. Cöthen 22 Dec. 1723; d. London 20 June 1787). German composer and viola da gamba player, resident mainly in London. Abel's father was a court musician at Cöthen alongside J. S. Bach, and Carl Friedrich may subsequently have studied with Bach in Leipzig. He left a post at the Dresden court as a result of the Seven Years War, travelling to London, where he gave his first concert on 5 April 1759. Arriving at the very start of a vogue for the latest German symphonies, Abel quickly became a major figure in London's concert life, both as instrumentalist and composer. Though the viola da gamba was regarded as outdated, even an eccentricity, his playing was so deeply expressive that his solos were constantly in demand for over twenty years (his Adagio became a byword for heartfelt performance and a model for string players). He was also successful in nurturing the patronage of aristocrats such as the Earl of Thanet (at whose house in 1764 Leopold Mozart became seriously ill); and probably in 1763 he was appointed chamber musician to the Queen. So too was J. C. Bach (whom he may have known from Germany), and on 29 February 1764 they gave their first concert together. In 1765 they joined forces in what became known as the Bach–Abel concerts, a series that ran until Bach's death in 1782.