Wolfgang's playlist

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Particularly interesting is the lengthy correspondence with his father about the staging of Idomeneo showing how interested Mozart was in every aspect of the dramatic setting and the way the music was to heighten this. What a pity that there doesn't seem to be - at least in the selections I have - the same kind of discussion about any of the da Ponte operas.

Indeed. Leopold died before Don Giovanni was written, but he knew of Figaro, and whilst correspondence between father and son about this work is lacking in Anderson (and surely she would have included it in her selection had any been available to her) there are a couple of letters from Leopold to his daughter - the first predicting a disaster, the second reporting a success!

Surviving correspondence between father and son in the last years of Leopold's life is scarce: after June 1784, there is just one letter from son to father included in Anderson: from a month before Leopold died, in which (after chatting about contemporary Musicians) he expresses his sorrow at hearing that his father is "really ill". Given Leopold's copious correspondence with his daughter, it appears likely that they communicated much more regularly than this suggests, but that the letters have been lost or are in the possession of a private individual - or possibly hiding in the vaults of a library somewhere, just waiting for their rediscovery!

[french frank]

Might there be two different publications involved here? The three-volume Letters of Mozart and His Family - chronologically arranged, translated and edited with an introduction, notes and indices by Emily Anderson, with extracts from the letters of Constanze Mozart to Johann Anton André translated and edited by C B Oldman published in 1938 by Macmillan & Co; AND Eric Blom's one-volume selection from Anderson, published by Pelican in 1956?

There must be a difference if Blom's is a selection. Mine is a revised 3rd edition (1985) by Stanley Sadie and Fiona Smart; it and the 2nd edition (1966) by Alec Hyatt King and Monica Carolan were both published by Macmillan. Blom's edition was published during Anderson's lifetime and 'with her assistance', but it wasn't the revision she had intended to make herself - she died in 1962 before she could complete it.