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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Fragmente. Vorgelegt von Ulrich Konrad. (Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke. Ser. X, Supplement; Werkgruppe 30, Bd. 4.) Kassel: Barenreiter, c2002. [Einleitung, p. xi-xxi; facsim. reprod. of fragments (in color), p. 1-214; Krit. Bericht, p. 215-83. Cloth. ISMN M-006-49626-6; BA 4616. [euro]232.]



Fragments by classical authors, whatever their species, are priceless. Among musical fragments, those by Mozart certainly deserve full attention and admiration. Had this great master not left behind so many completed works in every species, these magnificent relics alone would constitute an adequate monument to his inexhaustible Geist.

With this striking epigraph, profound and touching, Ulrich Konrad opens the introduction (p. xi; my trans., here and elsewhere) to his publication of a unique repertory: a volume comprising facsimiles, two to a page, shown in photographic reductions of roughly 50 percent of the originals, of some 141 of the 160 items so defined by Konrad. The book is inscribed "In memoriam Alan Tyson"--fittingly so, for it was Tyson's path-breaking article "The Mozart Fragments in the Mozarteum, Salzburg: A Preliminary Study of Their Chronology and Their Significance" (Journal of the American Musicological Society 34 [1981]: 471-510; reprinted in Tyson, Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores, 125-61 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987]) that set the study of these often riddling documents on a dramatically new and secure plane. (Tyson died on 10 November 2000.)

Not quite "works," the fragments have nonetheless found an ear among the devotees of Mozart's music, and for several reasons. For one, they have about them the aura of spontaneity, of the immediacy of composition--a proximity to the creative act--even if it is now clear that the autographs of works actually completed by Mozart do not differ appreciably in this regard. Then, pregnant with possibility, they whet the appetite for what might have been, inspiring more than one epigone to complete what Mozart left unfinished. No doubt it was this very possibility that led the author of our opening epigraph--Constanze Mozart, one is stunned to learn, writing to Breitkopf & Hartel in March 1800 (Mozart, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, Gesamtausgabe, 7 vols., ed. Wilhelm A. Bauer, Otto Erich Deutsch, and Joseph Heinz Eibl [Kassel: Barenreiter, 1962-75], 4:324 [no. 1,288])--to endow the fragments with aesthetic value, for it was in her interest to sell the fragments for the highest possible price. "Haven't even the briefest fragments of famous writers--Lessing, for example--been published?" she wrote coyly to Breitkopf in a letter of June 1799. "They ought to be consistently instructive, and the ideas in them could even be used by others and brought to completion" (Briefe, 4:250-51 [no. 1,245]).

Konrad takes a skeptical view of Constanze's invocation of the literary fragment. Her invocation of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) betrays a misunderstanding: what Lessing published as Zur Geschichte und Litteratur: Aus dem Schatzen der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Wolfenbuttel (6 pts. in 3 vols. [Brunswick: Waysenhaus-Buchhandlung, 1773-81]), commonly known as the Wolfenbutteler Fragmente, were actually excerpts from a theological work by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). Of Johann Gottfried von Herder's (1744-1803) "characteristic (Romantic) mode of thought and representation, in which a whole, either imaginary or perceived, is manifest only in literary beginnings or excerpts and thus remains open," Konrad (p. xv) holds that

with all this, and with the discourse on praxis and theory of the "non finito" conducted since the end of the seventeenth century in the visual arts, the Mozart fragments cannot be connected in any meaningful sense. As aesthetic commodity the unfinished musical work simply did not exist.

If Konrad is here advancing a historical argument--note the past tense--the aesthetic question comes up again more abstractly in a discussion of the much-vexed issue of the completion of the fragments by...

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