Mozart and the Keyboard Culture of His Time

What the Score Doesn't Tell Us
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Today’s performers are fortunate to have access to an ever-growing collection of authoritative scores and critical editions, as well as facsimiles of manuscripts and reprints of first editions. At a time when performers want editions that reveal the composer’s markings as faithfully as possible, another problem still remains: do we really know how to read these scores?

The second half of the eighteenth century saw the publication of many pedagogical keyboard tutors that addressed fundamentals of musicianship for the amateur keyboard player. The tutors of Leopold Mozart, Türk, and C. P. E. Bach, however, went far beyond fundamentals to eloquent writings on subtle matters of expression and above all musical taste. Study of these treatises can illuminate many notational idiosyncrasies and raise awareness of performance conventions absent from eighteenth-century scores but known to players immersed in the musical culture of those scores.

continue to The Piano Lesson
Introduction
From Sketch to Completed Work
From Print to CD
How did Mozart Compose?
The Mozart Myth: Tales of a Forgery
Mozart's Images
Mozart's Images Imagined
What the Score Doesn't Tell Us
The Piano Lesson
The Cult of Mozart
Commodification & Kitsch
Credits
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