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A collection of essays that reinvigorates our understanding of some of Mozart's best-loved works.

One of the world’s most revered composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) wrote works in almost every genre. His life and work continue to fascinate scholars, performers, and music lovers alike. Mozart and His World brings original perspectives to perennially popular topics in Mozart studies. Through wide-ranging essays that address interpretive, biographical, and contextual themes, the volume simultaneously widens and refines our view of Mozart’s oeuvre.

Mozart and His World moves from studies of instrumental music and musicians to the interpretation and reception of Mozart’s operas, and finally to primary sources from the decade or so after Mozart’s death. Across original chapters and several archival documents, Mozart and His World points new ways forward in key areas of Mozart scholarship, including the study of intellectual and stylistic ideas informing his works and of musicians and institutions within his orbit. While the volume reshapes our understanding of some of Mozart’s best-loved works, including The Magic Flute and his other operas, it also probes works that have received less attention, such as his early string quartets, an opera parody, and wind-music culture and arrangements.

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s precocity is so familiar as to be taken for granted. In scholarship and popular culture, Mozart the Wunderkind is often seen as belonging to a category of childhood all by himself. But treating the young composer as an anomaly risks minimizing his impact. In this book, Adeline Mueller examines how Mozart shaped the social and cultural reevaluation of childhood during the Austrian Enlightenment. Whether in a juvenile sonata printed with his age on the title page, a concerto for a father and daughter, a lullaby, a musical dice game, or a mass for the consecration of an orphanage church, Mozart’s music and persona transformed attitudes toward children’s agency, intellectual capacity, relationships with family and friends, political and economic value, work, school, and leisure time.
 
Thousands of children across the Habsburg Monarchy were affected by the Salzburg prodigy and the idea he embodied: that childhood itself could be packaged, consumed, deployed, “performed”—in short, mediated—through music. This book builds upon a new understanding of the history of childhood as dynamic and reciprocal, rather than a mere projection or fantasy—as something mediated not just through texts, images, and objects but also through actions. Drawing on a range of evidence, from children’s periodicals to Habsburg court edicts and spurious Mozart prints, Mueller shows that while we need the history of childhood to help us understand Mozart, we also need Mozart to help us understand the history of childhood.

Great music arouses wonder: how did the composer create such an original work of art? What was the artist's inspiration, and how did that idea become a reality? Cultural products inevitably arise from a context, a submerged landscape that is often not easily accessible. To bring such things to light, studies of the creative process find their cutting edge by probing beyond the surface, opening new perspectives on the apparently familiar.