Conferences organized by the Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg inevitably serve as a kind of touchstone: one tends to view the programme as a representative muster of international Mozart scholarship. Since on this occasion the organizers explicitly devoted part of the event to analysis (broadly understood as ‘scholarly work interpretation’), the October 2014 snapshot proved especially rich in insights, suggesting that the tools recently developed for the analysis of ‘galant style’ have much to offer for Mozart scholars, while ‘old-school’ source research still bears its fruits as well.

At the same time, the great number of ‘analytical’ presentations highlighted once again that ‘international Mozart scholarship’ as such is still but a cohabitation of different traditions: while in this eminent group of speakers the language barrier hardly played a decisive role, between the papers read in German and those presented in English there indeed seemed to be an ocean. It is itself telling that out of the seven papers that formed the opening thematic block of the event, five were in English, even though each of these outlined a somewhat different approach. James Webster (Cornell University), who has for many years been advocating the concept of ‘multivalent analysis’, provided an all-round interpretation of the trio ‘Che accidenti’ from Mozart's unfinished Lo sposo deluso (k430), arguing persuasively that for all the critical comment in the literature, it is as good an example of sublime beauty as any number in the better-received da Ponte operas. Danuta Mirka (University of Southampton) surveyed diverse appearances of the gavotte in Mozart's oeuvre, pointing out how the notated metre, variability of tempo or an unusual accompaniment may obscure the original character of the topic. Her suggestion that the opening of the Symphony in G minor k550 should also be interpreted as a gavotte raised many eyebrows, but also gave much food for thought. James Hepokoski (Yale University) discussed an apparent contradiction in terms: a ‘melancholic C major’ that one encounters in the Andante cantabile of the String Quartet in G major k387. One particularly appreciated the sensitive diagnosis of atrophy and disintegration in the music, the reference to the ‘fictional subjectivity’ conveyed by this style, as well as the presenter's efforts not to overwhelm his (in this respect mostly uninitiated) audience with the terminology of Sonata Theory. John Rice (Rochester, MN) added a new type to the galant schematicon as adumbrated by Robert Gjerdingen: the ‘Lully’ (a typical example of which appears in the first three bars of the aria ‘Che del ciel, che degli dei’ in La clemenza di Tito) is ubiquitous in the entire century, and Mozart gradually came to associate it with the idea of grandeur. Finally, Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) offered an altogether different kind of analysis by interpreting ‘Don Giovanni's indifference’ as a kind of antipode to the expressiveness of another symbolic musical hero, Orpheus, and from this viewpoint reading Mozart's and da Ponte's famous work in ever widening circles of cultural context.

The overtly ‘non-analytical’ nature of Sisman's analysis inevitably reminded one how each of the above presentations, no matter how many bar numbers might have been uttered, ended up connecting the results with more general aesthetic concerns in one way or another. By contrast, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen (Universität Zürich) closely focused on issues of musical architecture, insightfully demonstrating how the conventionality of the opening material in the first movement of the Piano Concerto in C major k503 allows the later enharmonic combinations to play a decisive role in structuring the movement. Similarly, Manfred Hermann Schmid (Augsburg) concentrated on a minor – though, as it turned out, highly suggestive – technical detail: how Mozart filled in the ‘gaps’ between the essential building-blocks of his musical compositions. The numerous examples taken from different periods revealed the composer's increasing tendency to organic integration: what seemed mere ‘filling’ in the earlier works gradually became a new playfield for thematic unity.

Most of the analytical papers presented on the third day of the conference also exhibited this more technical approach. Michael Spors (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart) reviewed a few of Heinrich Christoph Koch's ideas about musical structure to establish the extent to which they could be applied to Mozart's early symphonies. Charris Efthimiou (Kunstuniversität Graz) examined the same repertory with an eye to orchestration, concluding that Mozart tended to vary his colours more than many of his contemporaries and especially the older generation. Laura Krämer (Universität der Künste Berlin) scrutinized some of Mozart's rather complicated minuet themes, pointing out the manifold ways in which they are simplified when recapitulated, and Florian Walch (Universität Wien) presented an exhaustive analysis of the finale of the ‘Hoffmeister’ Quartet (k499). While each speaker made a point or two to remember, looking at these four papers as a group inevitably made me miss the wider outlook that had characterized the invited analytical papers of the first two days. Intriguingly, the paper by Markus Neuwirth (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), actually presented in English, sought to bridge the geographic divide, as it were, by discussing various kinds of deceptive cadence from Mozart's keyboard sonatas on the basis of a rich sample of contemporary treatises.

While analysis unquestionably dominated the programme, other important fields of Mozart scholarship also received their due. Milada Jonášová (Akademie věd České republiky, Prague) discussed the diverse (German, Czech and even Italian) productions of The Magic Flute in Prague in painstaking detail, while Diau-Long Shen (Freie Universität Berlin) demonstrated how the early Romantics sought to squeeze Mozart's opere buffe into the Procrustean bed of their own aesthetic. Turning to instrumental music, Simon P. Keefe (University of Sheffield) surveyed the accompanied sonatas Mozart composed after his move to the imperial capital, pointing out how the rise of Viennese music publishing, the composer's increasing awareness of the preferences of the local audience and his double identity as composer-cum-performer influenced his production. Katalin Komlós (Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem, Budapest) reviewed another aspect of Mozart's activities as keyboard player, namely his relationship with the organ – an instrument that scholars of ‘classical style’ tend to ignore today, even though playing it belonged to the everyday experiences of many a professional musician in the period.

The conference also included a number of papers that one could vaguely group under the label ‘source studies’. Cliff Eisen (King's College London) explored how the little-known diaries of Emmanuel de Croÿ can contribute to our understanding of Mozart's brief sojourn at Calais in August 1765, especially with respect to his composition of four-hand keyboard music. Walther Brauneis (Vienna) suggested that an enigmatic document containing a series of numbers may in fact be a calculation of the composer's gaming debts. To my mind, the presentation by Lucio Tufano (Naples) proved one of the highpoints of the conference. Shedding new light on the much-discussed ‘Ridente la calma’ (k152), he suggested that some of the differences between Mozart's canzonet and the aria by Mysliveček on which it seems to be based derive from a third source: an aria by Francesco Bianchi written for the famous castrato Luigi Marchesi. Since Mysliveček also wrote his aria for Marchesi, ‘Ridente la calma’ now seems less a homage to Mysliveček – as Marius Flothuis once argued – but rather one to Marchesi. (Whether or not the piece was actually written by Mozart, however, remains an open question.) Viktor Töpelmann (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) reported on his ongoing project to reconstruct the library of the Mozart family, and presented some fascinating results – who would have believed, for instance, that one can still locate books in Salzburg collections whose Mozartean provenance has remained unknown for over two hundred years? Anja Morgenstern (Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg) also shed light on a relatively little-known collection of Mozart sources, the papers of Johann Andreas Stumpff (1769–1846), which (among other things) reveal Stumpff's connections with Mozart's widow Constanze.

To conclude the group of source studies, my own paper (Balázs Mikusi, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Budapest) reported the discovery of an autograph fragment of Mozart's Sonata in A major (k331), which had been lying (arguably for several decades) among the unidentified fragments in the Music Collection of the National Széchényi Library. At the initiative of Ulrich Leisinger (Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg) the bifolio, which contains approximately half of the sonata, was also exhibited in the hall, and so the audience could take a close look at those passages where the autograph seems to confirm the reading of the 1784 Artaria print, which editors of modern urtext scores have all too easily tended to consider corrupt. One of these passages is bars 24–26 of the Menuetto, which, by way of an extraordinary coincidence, were the focus of a paper by David Jayasuriya (University of Southampton), who sought to solve the thorny dilemma of minor versus major by looking at numerous Fonte and Monte schemata in Mozart's other keyboard sonatas. Thus in this last session source studies and style analysis met in complete harmony, suggesting that these two fields – which I have tended here strictly to divide for the sake of clarity – should go hand in hand after all.

My conference ended with a lecture-recital by Robert D. Levin (Harvard University), who allowed us a rare glimpse into the analytical considerations that inspired him to complete anew several Mozart fragments, which were published soon after the composer's death as rounded off by Maximilian Stadler. Owing to the departure of our train I could only witness a small part of the final roundtable, but still heard the chair Gernot Gruber (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna) saying that analysis as a rule starts out with a concrete work, but – as this conference has also shown – optimally reaches conclusions of more general relevance. A fitting conclusion I am happy to appropriate for this report as well.