Paper trails to Mozart

Konrad Kuster, in his "musical biography" of Mozart, attempts "to follow the course of the composer's life by the light of selected compositions": the life as interpreted through the music, and so an exploration of "the artistic development which cannot be separated from the life". In fact he more often ends up doing the more conventional, traditional opposite, illuminating the music by reference to Mozart's life - which is arguably the proper function of any kind of biographical study of any kind of artist. And what he most usefully does is to try to absorb into the biographical canon some of the results of the newest significant Mozart research, specially acknowledging what he surprisingly calls the "utterly reliable" Neue Mozart-Ausgabe. The recent findings of Alan Tyson, culminating in his NMA volumes devoted to paper and watermark studies, easily form the largest single part.

The book, accordingly, takes the form of a series of quite short chapters on particular works, or groups of works, on which new light has been shed, or in some cases where Kuster has a new theory of his own to propose. A good example is the one on the horn concertos, where Tyson has shown that the works formerly numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4 are chronologically nos 2, 4, 3 and 1. Kuster looks at the implications of this, and of Mozart's relationship to their dedicatee, Joseph Leutgeb (on whom he has some new information), and draws certain conclusions, putting forward a fresh (if unconvincing) interpretation of Mozart's intentions in his use of coloured inks in these works. The Musical Joke is another work where, following up Tyson's research, he advances an interesting view, in place of the traditional notion that the work is a parody of inferior composers, that it is "a study of musical impossibilities".

Sometimes he gets Tyson's evidence wrong, or overlooks it. After a valuable account of the Linz Symphony and the circumstances of its composition, he refers to Mozart's slow introduction to a Michael Haydn symphony (K444, Mozart's "Symphony no.37") as having been given at the same concert, although we now know that the paper Mozart used indicates an origin some months later; and he says that the shortened version of Fuor del mar in Idomeneo was written because the elderly Anton Raaff at Munich could not cope with the full-length original, although that version was written on Viennese rather than Munich paper and must therefore belong to the 1786 revival. Kuster uncritically follows Tyson's shaky arguments on the precedence of the two slow movements of the Paris Symphony against the weight of evidence in favour of the traditional view. In all these cases he has looked, but not hard enough.

The early chapters present some fascinating insights on the development of the very young Mozart. Yet behind this discussion lurks an assumption that Leopold always faithfully recorded just what his small son wanted, without emendation, without improvement. If he is wrong, the theories crumble.

There is an enlightening chapter on the form taken by the youthful masses and how this relates to current liturgical requirements in Salzburg. An intelligent one on the Masonic Funeral Music elaborates on why Mozart seems to have composed a funeral piece for two masons who were still alive and well. Among the other works that come under scrutiny are the flute quartets and concertos written for Dejean. Kuster's rabbit-out-of-a-hat solution to the enigma (if it is one) of Mozart's non-productivity - that Dejean was a poor flautist - is strained: Mozart, never one to withhold criticism, would surely have said as much to his father.

Several chapters are devoted to the operas. Kuster has light to shed on Die Entfuhrung and particularly on the way the music elucidates the relationship between Belmonte and Osmin.

On Figaro he writes fascinatingly about the pull of tonalities and their link with the various destinations of the plot; the theories do not work very tidily - certain numbers have to be ignored if they are to work comprehensively - but they work well enough to carry some weight and cannot be overlooked in future criticism of the work. Even if the key significances were not audible to most of his audience, we may be sure that Mozart himself was conscious of them. His Don Giovanni chapter is more a series of perceptive jottings but the inept plot outline that starts it gives one little confidence (the Commendatore does not catch Giovanni "in the act of seducing his daughter", and Giovanni does not escape at the end of act 1, where there is simply a traditional confrontation finale unresolved except by the curtain). The chapter on Cosi fan tutte is particularly confused; the one on La clemenza di Tito is written as though the work were a lone relic of a forgotten genre (this lack of musical context is typical) when in fact it sits squarely in the late opera seria tradition. That is a very Germanic view; Kuster's footnotes reveal his grounding in Teutonic musicology and are too modest in awareness of the fresh thinking going on elsewhere in the world.

Much of Kuster's discussion is concerned with Mozart's handling of musical form, which is perfectly proper: the manipulation of musical design was one of Mozart's principal and most conscious strategies, in sonatas, concertos and operas alike. His treatment of some of these issues seems oddly old-fashioned, even naive. Early in the book - when we are in the 1760s - he refers to sonata form and Mozart's relation to it as if "sonata form" were a pre-existing entity. We are, I fear, back in the world where form is viewed as a jelly-mould receptacle for musical ideas, where there exists a scheme, and composers who do not use it are avoiding it, or divagating from it, or aspiring to it, or something of the kind.

This is unhistorical. It is impossible to understand the function of Mozart's forms if one starts from 19th-century textbook orthodoxy; even in writing of the last three symphonies Kuster refers to "the rules of conventional sonata form" as though Mozart were flouting some prescriptive law.

There are too many inaccuracies. The first movement of K183 is not in triple metre; there are not "flutes" but a single flute in the last three symphonies; Tyson does not show that the Prague finale belongs to early 1786, only that the paper it is written on was used earlier in the year; biographically, there is no reason to think that the Italian visits started him on concerto composition (London five years earlier, more likely), there is not the slightest evidence that "Mozart and Aloysia (Weber) had dreamt of a future together" (Mozart did, but not Aloysia), and Haydn's remark about Mozart's lack of a court position is misunderstood. This book's objectives are worthy ones, but to realise them more precision and a wider context, as regards both Mozart's world and modern scholarship, would be needed.

Stanley Sadie is editor, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.