Michael Lorenz: Mozart letters

Oct 4, 2014

Three Mistranslations of a Mozart Letter

In his article "The 'Effective Passage' in Mozart's 'Paris' Symphony" (Eighteenth-Century Music, 9/2012), Matthias Range deals with the meaning of the words "mitten" and "auf die lezt" in Mozart's letter of 3 July 1778 to his father and their translation by Emily Anderson, Robert Spaethling and Stanley Sadie. But the real blooper in all three published translations of this letter went completely unnoticed.

Like in countless other cases, Emily Anderson, with her persuasive mistranslation, was able to completely convince her male successors. Her nonsensical "There were shouts of 'Da capo'" duly led to Spaethling's "There they were: the shouts of Da capo", and Sadie's "When there were shouts of Da capo".

There were no shouts of "Da capo". Shouts of "Da capo" would have been totally out of place anyway at this moment, because this already was the Da capo. Mozart does not refer to what the audience shouted, he describes how it burst into applause for a second time. Here is the correct translation of the last sentence of this passage in Mozart's letter:

I brought it once again at the end of the movement – and there they went again.

The fact that there is still no reliable and scholarly annotated translation of the Mozart family letters is still a major impediment for Mozart scholarship.

Mozart's signature in his letter to Sebastian Winter of 30 September 1786 (D-KA, Don Mus. Autogr. 45)

Sep 1, 2012

Mozart Documents "transcribed" (follow-up)

I recently pointed out that money is being spent in Salzburg on the copying of flawed 50-year-old transcriptions of Mozart documents. It turns out that the web-based project "Mit MOZARTs Worten", which in the future is supposed to present the complete Mozart family correspondence on the Internet, is also using copy work from the old Bauer/Deutsch edition of the Mozart letters. Because the experts involved in this edition obviously lack the necessary palaeographical expertise and experience, they are unaware of the eighteenth-century use of what was called "Fahnen-h", i.e. a letter resembling a Kurrent "h" that was used to double the following consonant, if it was an l, m, n, r, or s (except where the known elongation of the preceding vowel indicated otherwise). For sheer lack of archival practice, Bauer and Deutsch never became aware of this custom which slowly fell into oblivion in the second half of the nineteenth century, and still survives in Austrian family names such as "Weihs", "Lahner" and "Muhm" (and especially exemplary in the name of the Lower Austrian town of Gföhl which was once a "Gföll", i.e. a customs station). The same goes for the special "f" which was often used at the end of words, especially after diphtongs. Since it resembles a regular double-f, it is still repeatedly being mistranscribed, even by renowned historians. The stubborn dragging along of old flaws in Bauer's and Deutsch's edition of the Mozart letters results in digital publications being fraught with countless embarrassing mistranscriptions, such as "genohmen" and "gefahlen". And I am completely sure that Nannerl Mozart's entry in her diary from 10 April 1764 will forever be transcribed with "[...] wie das mer ablaufet und wieder Zunihmt[sic!]".