What more can there possibly be to learn about either the man or his music that we don’t already know?

Paradoxically, the answer is quite a lot. The principal primary source for Mozartian scholars down through the years has been the extensive number of surviving letters written by members of the Mozart family. Yet it is only comparatively recently that it has become recognised that far from being taken at face value, many of the letters need considerable scrutiny and careful consideration before some of their contents are accepted as unquestioned truths. Neither Mozart nor his father Leopold, the principal letter writers of the preserved correspondence, was on occasions above dissembling.

Moreover, as with any ongoing research, new facts consistently emerge, often laying to rest myths of long standing. The case of the so-called "Jeunehomme" Piano Concerto in E flat, K271 (No. 9 in the traditional numbering) is a recent example. For long believed to have taken its name from an otherwise unknown French pianist by the name of Mme or Mlle Jeunehomme, for whom a romantic attachment with Mozart has even been mooted, it has been established that the name was an invention of Mozart’s early 20th-century French biographers Wyzewa and Saint-Foix, a corruption of Mozart’s references to "Jenomy" or "Jenomè". As recently as 2005 the lady concerned was identified as Louise-Victoire Jenamy, the daughter of the great choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre, who the Mozarts had met and become friendly with in Vienna in 1773.

The exploding of the "Jeunehomme" myth is faithfully recorded in Stanley Sadie’s Mozart and in the Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia (henceforth CME), books that share the unusual merit of being of considerable value to both the newcomer to Mozart bibliography and those who may have already have built some kind of library on the composer. As the name implies, the CME is primarily a reference book, arranged alphabetically, although not always necessarily helpfully; entries such as "shorter piano pieces" or "smaller church works" are not the first places one might think of looking for consideration of popular works such as the A-minor Rondo, K511 or Ave verum corpus, K616, which is in the event considered under "motet". Using the book as a working tool, one of the first checks I made was "epistle sonata", for which there is no entry. Only later did I discover this group of works are listed under "church sonata"; a cross-referenced incipit in such cases would have been helpful. But in general terms, the dictionary is a pleasure to use and, to be fair, there is an index that will direct the reader to any given work, although I suspect that most will use the volume to browse.

Sadie’s Mozart is the fruit of many years work, constantly interrupted by other demands on his time and sadly brought to an end by his death early in 2005. Fortunately, he was just able to complete the first part of a study reflecting a lifelong love and deep understanding of his subject. It ends, poignantly, on the unresolved cliff-hanger of Mozart’s imminent dismissal from Salzburg court service. Sadie’s format is a juxtaposition of meticulous chronological narrative blended with consideration of literally every work composed during the period in question. Nothing escapes his attention, even the most insignificant early work receiving a few lines of comment, while major pieces are given substantive treatment. Idomeneo, for instance, is granted 25 pages of introduction and analysis, written in the clear, uncluttered prose that makes the book such a pleasure to read. The opera, indisputably the young Mozart’s greatest achievement, is also the subject of an excellent essay by Julian Rushton in the CME. Those familiar with Mozart’s music will probably find assessments with which to disagree with Sadie – I was surprised to find him describing the exquisite opening Kyrie of the Litany, K243 as "conventional" - but in general they are sound and mercifully free of the adulatory approach that would have us believe that every note Mozart composed dripped with genius. His perceptive insights on the remarkable, if flawed opera seria Lucio Silla, K135 (1772) seem to me to strike a better balance then the uncritical entry by Tim Carter in CME, where the assertion that Idomeneo is "just around the corner" is surely wide of the mark. One of the many miracles of Idomeneo is in fact just how far Mozart had come in the eight years that separate the composition of the two operas.

As anyone who knew Sadie will readily confirm, one his characteristics was the fair-minded and balanced view he brought to all put before him for consideration. If that at times lead him to produce rather inconclusive record reviews, here it serves as one his book’s greatest strengths. The clear-headed analyses of individual works is supplemented by insights of a more general nature, among them the destruction of the long-standing myth that Mozart composed his works in complete form in his head. The D-Major Piano Sonata, K284 provides ample evidence that he did not do so. The autograph includes an abandoned version of the exposition and 19 bars of the development of the first movement. At this point Mozart clearly thought he was going in the wrong direction, crossed out all the music he had written and started again. The composer’s compositional method is also the subject of a brilliant CME essay by Ulrich Konrad, who in its course proposes convincing arguments to explain why Mozart left more unfinished works than any composer of comparable stature.

Equally as welcome is the fairness of Sadie’s biographical narrative, which takes us unerringly on the Mozarts’ well-documented journeys across Europe, to Italy, and to Mannheim and Paris in addition to the periods when the family were at home in Salzburg, times when the inevitable absence of letters means we know less about what the family were doing. The traditional villains of the Mozart story – Archbishop Colloredo and, to some people, Mozart’s father Leopold - are given admirably disinterested treatment (as indeed they are in Ruth Halliwell’s biographical entries in CME), Sadie noting that for all Colloredo’s aloofness and unpopularity in Salzburg, the Mozarts were far from ideal employees. He sternly dismisses the views of those who would see Leopold as an exploitative manipulator of Wolfgang’s fortunes; indeed his sensitive treatment of the complex relationship between father and son is one of the most rewarding threads running through the book. There are even times when it is Wolfgang that Sadie seems to treat rather harshly, as for example when he finds his letters back to Leopold from Mannheim and Paris "extraordinary" regarding the "insensitivity in their treatment of his father". This is surely to miss the point. Just as Maria Theresa must bear a measure of responsibility for the subsequent fate of the hapless Marie Antoinette in France, so must Leopold for sending his son out into the world with so little preparation for its wiles.

There are a number of small slips in Sadie’s book that might have been eliminated had he been granted a little longer, the reference to Laudate pueri instead of Laudate Dominum (p. 498) being one that could be corrected if the book is reprinted. And it surely will be, for this is now the most up-to-date, exhaustive and sanely reliable biographical and musical study now available in the English language, a superb achievement that will surely stand the test of time. Production standards are not all they might have been. The paper quality is not good and the black and white illustrations are darkly grainy, while we have the old bugbear of endnotes rather than infinitely more user-friendly footnotes. The CME, a superior production, also seems destined to take its place on the shelves as an indispensable reference for Mozartians, although the exorbitant price will doubtless persuade the more impecunious of them to await the inevitable paperback. I still have the keenly anticipated pleasure of exploring many of its major essays, but in the meantime was delighted to discover that it is not too grand to include an entry on Mozartkugeln, the unpalatable confectionary that serves the major function of allowing Salzburg to continue successfully to exploit its favourite son.
Brian Robins.

Mozart: The Early Years 1756-1781
Stanley Sadie
Oxford University Press, 2006
644 pp. [ISBN 0-19-816529-3]

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia
Cliff Eisen & Simon P. Keefe (eds.)
Cambridge University Press, 2006
662 pp. [ISBN 10 0-521-85659-0]