Mozart

Garden City New York: Garden City Publishing Co, Inc - Nelson Doubleday, 1943. First Edition Assumed . Hard Back. Very Good/No Dust Jacket. 5 3/4" x 8 1/4. 400 Pages Indexed. Light gray boards with maroon lettering. Top page edges are red. Previous owner's ex-libris label pasted to front endpaper. Text pages are bright, tight, and white. Very well cared for book. From the Foreword -- I make no apology for my abandonment of formal documentary technique. This book uses original documents in direct quotation, quoted so directly that they are integral with the text. Footnotes would throw each of them back into the source-material from which I extracted them for the purpose of letting the characters tell the story themselves. Readers for pleasure will not be troubled by this, and readers for duty will know, like all Mozart students, whence each quotation comes. Furthermore, the bibliography covers all sources from which quotations have been made. Throughout the book, double quotation-marks have been used solely to designate original source-material. All imaginary conversation, written by me, is in single quotation-marks. There is no imaginary description. Streets, houses, rooms, furniture, clothes, and all other objects are described only as I have seen them in my pursuit of Mozart across Europe, or as they are found in original documents, or in paintings or prints of the period. The symbol following initial mention of each of Mozart's important works refers, of course, to the Kochel index which takes the place of opus classification. For the years up to 1777, the French classification of deWyzewa and de Saint-Foix is probably more accurate, but the revised Kochel catalogue soon to be issued by Breitkopf & Hartel will take account of the discrepancies which, in any case, concern minor works. After 1784, Mozart kept his own catalogue. The Kochel numbering is standard, and the reader will be able easily to identify, in other writings and on programmes, the works discussed. No specific mention is made, in the text, of the lost Mozart works which turn up from time to time. Like the Mass in C, written at Salzburg in 1776, and recently found at Baden-bei- Wien, such compositions, however interesting, were part of his work as organist for the Archbishop of Salzburg, and have slight bearing on his later years.