Originally published in German as Interpreting Mozart on the Keyboard in 1957, this definitive work on the performance of Mozart's works has greatly influenced students and scholars of keyboard literature and of Mozart. Now, in a completely updated and revised edition, this book includes the last half century of scholarship on Mozart's music, addressing the elements of performance and problems that may occur in performing Mozart's works on modern instruments.

"Definitive study of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert by an award-winning author.

The author has made the study and performance of the piano works of Mozart his special field. In this volume he presents insights, gained through years of intensive study, into many important aspects of the piano sonatas. Consideration of the influence of contemporary composers, pianos in Mozart's time, Mozart's use of keys, chords, and ornamentation, and some of Mozart's ideas on piano playing provide a perspective for the interpretive survey of all the sonatas and for the interpretive analysis of six selected sonatas. The study is primarily concerned not with technical aspects of the music but with its message--its imaginative wealth and emotional depth, as revealed through the clarity of its form and the restraint of its harmonic language.

The Cambridge Companion to Mozart paints a rounded yet focussed picture of one of the most revered artists of all time. Bringing the most recent scholarship into the public arena, this volume bridges the gap between scholarly and popular images of the composer, enhancing the readers' appreciation of Mozart and his extraordinary output, regardless of their prior knowledge of the music. Part I situates Mozart in the context of late eighteenth-century musical environments and aesthetic trends that played a pivotal role in his artistic development and examines his methods of composition. Part II surveys Mozart's works in all of the genres in which he excelled and Part III looks at the reception of the composer and his music since his death. Part IV offers insight into Mozart's career as a performer as well as theoretical and practical perspectives on historically informed performances of his music.

An innovative study of the ways performance influenced Mozart’s compositional style. We know Mozart as one of history’s greatest composers. But his contemporaries revered him as a multi-instrumentalist, a dazzling improviser, and the foremost keyboard virtuoso of his time. When he composed, it was often with a single aim in mind: to set the stage, quite literally, for compelling and captivating performances. He wrote piano concertos not with an eye to posterity but to give himself a repertoire with which to flaunt his keyboard wizardry before an awestruck public. The same was true of his sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and operas, all of which were painstakingly crafted to produce specific effects on those who played or heard them, amusing, stirring, and ravishing colleagues and consumers alike. Mozart the Performer brings to life this elusive side of Mozart’s musicianship. Dorian Bandy traces the influence of showmanship on Mozart’s style, showing through detailed analysis and imaginative historical investigation how he conceived his works as a series of dramatic scripts. Mozart the Performer is a book for anyone who wishes to engage more deeply with Mozart’s artistry and legacy and understand why, centuries later, his music still captivates us.

Mozart's greatest works were written in Vienna in the decade before his death (1781–1791). This biography focuses on Mozart's dual roles as a performer and composer and reveals how his compositional processes are affected by performance-related concerns. It traces consistencies and changes in Mozart's professional persona and his modus operandi and sheds light on other prominent musicians, audience expectations, publishing, and concert and dramatic practices and traditions. Giving particular prominence to primary sources, Simon P. Keefe offers new biographical and critical perspectives on the man and his music, highlighting his extraordinary ability to engage with the competing demands of singers and instrumentalists, publishing and public performance, and concerts and dramatic productions in the course of a hectic, diverse and financially uncertain freelance career. This comprehensive and accessible volume is essential for Mozart lovers and scholars alike, exploring his Viennese masterpieces and the people and environments that shaped them.

An examination of Mozart's piano sonatas, showing them to be a microcosm of the composer's changing style.

Aspects of beauty in the music of Mozart It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In Mozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

This book includes essays by distinguished musicologists and performers, each exploring a different aspect of Mozart's music in performance.