Perspectives on Mozart Performance

Perspectives on Mozart Performance, published during the Mozart bicentennial year, is the first volume in a new series. It includes essays by distinguished musicologists and performers, each exploring a different aspect of Mozart's music in performance. Several studies consider the eighteenth-century roots of Mozart's approach to performance and examine such issues as the role of ornamentation (Paul Badura-Skoda, Frederick Neumann), improvization (Katalin Komls), cadenzas (Christoph Wolff), and Mozart's conception of tempos in a pre-metronomic age (Jean-Pierre Marty). Two studies examine Mozart's string writing (Jaap Schroeder) and the influence of his father's remarkably popular Violinschule (Robin Stowell). An essay by Peter Williams treats Mozart's use of the chromatic fourth and performance styles associated with that figura. Finally, the later, nineteenth-century response to Mozart is explored through the study of Mendelssohn's performances of Mozart (R. Larry Todd).