The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia

Abstract

Mozart's enduring popularity, among music lovers as a composer and among music historians as a subject for continued study, lies at the heart of The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. This reference book functions both as a starting point for information on specific works, people, places and concepts as well as a summation of current thinking about Mozart. The extended articles on genres reflect the latest in scholarship and new ways of thinking about the works while the articles on people and places provide historical framework, as well as interpretation. It also includes a series of thematic articles that cast a wide net over the eighteenth century and Mozart's relationship to it: these include Austria, Germany, aesthetics, travel, Enlightenment, Mozart as a reader and contemporaneous medicine, among others. The worklist provides the most up-to-date account in English of the authenticity and chronology of Mozart's compositions.

The importance of chance and interactivity in creativity

“…Mozart, for example, has been held as an exemplar of internalist creativity because he once allegedly wrote, "[P]rovided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind" (published in Rochlitz 1815). He is now thought to have worked interactively, typically needing a piano or harpsichord, the letter now discredited as forged (Keefe 2006).…”