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Mozart’s Chamber Music with Keyboard (ed. Martin Harlow)

Contribution of the individual to the anthology

The new lines of questioning which concern the generic placement of this corpus of Mozart’s oeuvre run as a trace throughout the essays in this edited volume, questions which were formulated at an international conference on the subject organised by Harlow and held at the RNCM in 2008 (see REF5). Harlow’s role in commissioning, editing and organising the resulting outcomes are directed towards eliciting both a significant reappraisal of individual works and a variety of wider questions of genre and biography within the context of the first intensive study of this corpus.

Chapter 1, ‘The Chamber Music with Keyboard in Mozart Biography’, sets the tone, examining biography as a new area for musicological discourse, and assessing the line of biographies of Mozart as powerful determinants in the musical reception of the disparate works which make up the body of his chamber music with keyboard. Through this case study biography is shown to shape critical, performer and listener experience. The hitherto unrecorded generic ambiguities around Mozart’s quintet K.452 are highlighted in a close reading of this work in Chapter 10, ‘Action, reaction and interaction, and the play of style and genre in Mozart’s Piano and Wind Quintet, K.452’, where our modern reading and hearing of the work is conditioned by acculturated misconceptions historical, stylistic and generic. The essay offers paradigms for application to other Mozart repertory, and other music of the classical period. By way of conclusion the editor’s conversation with Charles Rosen explores the ideas of public and private music, as they pertain to genre. Rosen’s ideas are enmeshed and supported by reference to his published work, on Mozart, classical music and style.