Christian Broy's Zur Überlieferung der großbesetzten musikalischen Werke Leopold Mozarts (On the Transmission of Leopold Mozart's Musical Works for Large Ensembles) is easily the most comprehensive and detailed account of the sources for a significant portion of Leopold's output yet published and in many respects supersedes previous dissertations, worklists and thematic and non-thematic catalogues. It includes a wealth of detail concerning copyists, watermarks, the history of numerous sacred and secular institutions and their music collections, and the mechanics of music distribution in eighteenth-century Germany and Austria in particular. Earlier studies of Leopold Mozart's works touch on only some of these details, or present them in such summary fashion that a larger picture – Leopold Mozart as both composer and promoter of his own works – rarely emerges, at least not in the embryonic way it does here.

The bulk of the book is taken up with chapters on Leopold Mozart's biography and reputation, criteria for the authenticity of the sources, the distribution of his music at sacred and secular institutions and Leopold's dealings with music publishers. It also includes appendices that in tabular form detail the manuscripts produced by Salzburg copyists and what Broy describes as ‘Erstabnehmer’ (original owner; 194), even though it is not clear in all instances that some sources did not, in fact, have an ‘intermediate’ dissemination. The distinction is a problematic one, in any case, as several details reported by Broy make clear: at least some of the symphony manuscripts now in Regensburg and elsewhere, for example, may well be the product of intermediate sources, or be mixed ‘originals’ (that is, parts obtained from Leopold himself) and copies. Who, then, is the ‘Erstabnehmer’ (and for that matter, what is the original ‘source’)? And who is to say that other copies weren't passed around among several ‘owners’ before they finally remained in some collection or elsewhere? Certainly Leopold seems to have been aware of such circulation, writing to his Augsburg publisher and friend Johann Jakob Lotter on 10 April 1755 that it is better to buy copies from the author himself in order to ensure both readability and accuracy – though in this case it may also be that Leopold wanted to protect his financial interest (see the remarks concerning the copyist ?Franz Claudi Wagner in my Leopold-Mozart-Werkverzeichnis (Augsburg: Wissner, 2010), 216–217).

Parts of the book – in particular the chapter on criteria for authenticity, with its discussion of autograph and non-autograph sources – reproduce material that is widely known and hardly bears repetition, even if it fulfils the need to demonstrate (in what is a dissertation) a command of the literature and the basic concepts behind the study. It is, nevertheless, a useful summary, even if Broy sometimes seems not to take into account the distinction between the authenticity of a source and the authenticity of a work, two different aspects of ‘authenticity’ altogether, as shown by studies not only of Leopold Mozart's works, but of Wolfgang's as well. And there is at least one curious misstatement concerning the survival of autographs of Leopold's instrumental works: according to Broy (56–57), the only instrumental works by Leopold now known in his autograph are a minuet (lmvX:2), a Tempo di Menuetto for keyboard (lmvXIII:6) and some sketches and drafts (works are identified by the numbers assigned them in Leopold-Mozart-Werkverzeichnis, for which Broy provided invaluable assistance and information). He seems to have overlooked at least one important, dated autograph that has been known to scholars all along, Leopold's trumpet concerto (lmvIX:13), the manuscript of which is in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

Following Broy's discussion of authenticity are chapters that deal successively with the dissemination of Leopold's works at sacred and secular institutions and among specific individuals, and his dealings with publishers, mainly in south Germany (Johann Jakob Lotter in Augsburg and Johann Ulrich Haffner in Nuremberg) but also including Breitkopf in Leipzig. These chapters are full of useful information, on the institutions, the individuals attached to them and their relationship to Leopold and to the Salzburg court; in some respects they could constitute the basis for broader social studies by at least establishing clearly who might or might not have belonged to any particular social network and what the basis of those networks might have been. And of course there is a wealth of detailed information on the sources for Leopold's works; here Broy follows the models of Alan Tyson, Wolfgang Plath and others by considering copyists and watermarks among documentary evidence. Some of the information is new, especially concerning sources discovered by Broy in the course of his research, including a manuscript of the symphony lmvVII:B1 now at the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn (and lacking in my Leopold-Mozart-Werkverzeichnis). And virtually all of it is more detailed than anything previously published.

Almost lost in the thicket of details concerning various aspects of the manuscripts, their owners, their copyists and their watermarks is a broader picture that might be drawn of Leopold as an entrepreneur. Sometimes – as in Broy's careful analysis of music by Leopold handled by Breitkopf in Leipzig, or his speculations concerning Leopold's relationship (and its apparent breakdown) with the Augsburg publisher Johann Jakob Lotter (163–174 in particular) – Broy touches on important questions that ought to be looked into further: what was the full extent of the dissemination of Leopold's works throughout Europe (in particular German-speaking Europe)? What role did the symphonies, more than seventy of them, play in the history of the genre? (At least some of them are as early – and were possibly as widely distributed – as others claimed to have laid the foundations for the further cultivation of works of this sort, yet they are never, or hardly ever, considered central to the history of the symphony.) And what does the dissemination of Leopold's music tell us about his position in Salzburg and, in particular, his entrepreneurial spirit? Questions such as these may have been beyond the scope of Broy's dissertation research, and hence this book, but he sometimes alludes to them and provides tantalizing suggestions, even if these are never followed up.

This last in particular – Leopold's entrepreneurship – gets a bit of play in Broy's summing-up, and here he might have gone a bit further without sacrificing the main strength of his study, his description and evaluation of the sources. He raises the question, for example, of who exactly was responsible for arranging the publication by Haffner of Nuremberg of a number of sonatas by Salzburg composers, not only Leopold's own, but also sonatas by Adlgasser and Eberlin (158–163). Although the question cannot be fully answered, it is nevertheless germane to an understanding of the broader relationships between Leopold and his colleagues, Leopold and the court, Leopold and the European music scene more generally – and, ultimately, Leopold and Wolfgang. Not that a study of Leopold must inevitably turn to the relationship between father and son. Indeed, such a narrowness of focus, such Wolfgang-centricity, has previously been a stumbling-block not only to much Leopold Mozart research but also to W. A. Mozart research as well: it sometimes seems that scholars are more interested in playing out their own father–son complexes, from one side or the other, than in soberly examining the sources and drawing reasonable musical and biographical conclusions. At the same time, however, it is information such as that presented by Broy – solid source research – that can provide a compelling basis for thinking differently about these broader questions. Broy's conclusion, summary as it is, is that Leopold was enterprising (and while Broy does not discuss other Salzburg composers much, it seems that this involved being much more enterprising than his colleagues); he was ‘different’, and here, at least in part (and at the risk of oversimplifying), is an explanation for why and how he promoted Wolfgang.