Mozart's Obviously Corrupt Minuet

• Published in: Music analysis Vol. 29; no. 1-3; pp. 61 - 82
• Main Author: GJERDINGEN, ROBERT O.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.03.2010; Wiley-Blackwell; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: 18th century; Classical music; Cognitive space; Composers; Minuet; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-1791); Music; Music analysis; Music composition; Music publishing; Musical aesthetics; Musical perception; Musical phrases; Popular culture; Sonatas
• ISSN: 0262-5245; 1468-2249
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2011.00326.x

The Romantic and Modern reception and reinterpretation of eighteenth-century music stretches over a period much longer than that of the eighteenth century itself, in the process forming its own authenticity and norms. Modern editors of eighteenth-century music must occasionally grapple with musical texts which appear to violate either the earlier or later standards. A minuet whose text seemed 'obviously corrupt' to the official editors of Mozart's keyboard sonatas would probably have seemed highly artful yet utterly normative to Mozart or his audiences. A focus on the norms of musical phrases was proposed by the Victorian author Violet Paget, writing under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. Her immersion in eighteenth-century music at an early age, along with her training in the Italian tradition, gave her a unique position from which to comment on the differences between the musical culture of her own time and that of Mozart and his Italian models.