Like Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, the opera buffa that serves as its guiding thread, the book Cabals and Satires opens with an act of counting. Ian Woodfield prefaces his Introduction with a section on sources that lists the sixty-two journals, ranging geographically from Budapest to London and Florence to Tartu, that he was able to consult with ease thanks to recent advances in the digitization of eighteenth-century newspapers and other periodicals. I found myself humming Figaro's opening line, ‘Cinque . . . dieci . . . venti’, while browsing the list, and as a scholar who also works frequently with digitized print materials, I appreciated Woodfield's pause at the outset of his project to acknowledge the transformative effect of this opening-up of one corner of the eighteenth-century archive.

Based on an exhaustive reading of these journals’ coverage of opera in Vienna, Woodfield offers a microhistory of the years 1785 to 1791 – the period between Joseph II's reinstatement of the National Singspiel and the consolidation of Leopold II's control over the national theatres in 1791. Woodfield's study is both hyperlocal, in its focus on the Viennese national theatres and some of their commercial counterparts in the suburbs, and imperial in scope, accounting for the geopolitical forces that influenced opera in the capital city and its reception across the Monarchy. It is also both leisurely and breathless: it progresses at the pace of one season or less per chapter, yet focuses almost exclusively on the moment-to-moment narrative of intertroupe rivalries as they intersected with Habsburg politics. This means it is left largely to the reader to step back and infer conclusions about Mozart's Viennese comic operas and their import in their own time.

Perhaps the most important of Cabals and Satires’ conclusions is that, despite the fact that late eighteenth-century Viennese opera was public theatre and thus beholden to audiences and the press, the national theatres (the Italian troupe at the Burgtheater and the German troupe at the Kärntnertortheater) were still dependent on and oriented towards their imperial patron. It may seem self-evident, but it bears repeating that the national theatres were an arm of diplomacy, controlled and instrumentalized by Joseph to accomplish all sorts of political ends. They were therefore, like Joseph himself, often a hostage to unpredictable events like war, marriage and death as these impinged on statecraft. Another key idea is that these operas were in very specific conversations with one another, further examples of what Mary Hunter has described as ‘the authorial jostling and performative games that formed part of the contingent life of opera buffa on the Viennese stage’ (The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 5). Many of us are familiar with the operatic ‘battle of the bands’ between Salieri's Prima la musica e poi le parole and Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor, or how Don Giovanni’s banquet scene includes quotations from Sarti's Fra i due litiganti, Martín y Soler's Una cosa rara and Figaro. Woodfield shows just how many other operas in this period engaged in similar thrusts, parries and counterthrusts. Almost every opera in this book is framed as a specific, pointed instance of creative reception of – even retaliation toward – one or more of its predecessors. Where Hunter sees such operatic conversations as primarily aesthetic and generic, Woodfield views them as primarily institutional and imperial, driven by power and politics.

The first of Woodfield's operatic duels took place in 1785–1786, when Joseph reinstated the Singspiel troupe with the aforementioned ‘festive competition’ between Salieri's and Mozart's one-act satires (5). The intertroupe rivalry between opera buffa and singspiel mirrored the larger aesthetic and political rivalries between Vienna and Berlin, and in chapter 1 Woodfield traces the many ways Joseph controlled and exploited this rivalry, from scheduling to funding to the spectacle of his own attendance at premieres and festive performances. As Woodfield points out, Mozart was among those who frequently found themselves on both sides of the rivalry. Having composed two of the Singspiel troupe's greatest successes, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Der Schauspieldirektor, Mozart was now completing Figaro for the Italian troupe, and was therefore ‘facing opposition from both elements in the Singspiel faction . . . and from some Italians’ (23). With Figaro we encounter the most prominent example of Woodfield's cabals, as supporters of the National Singspiel ‘burst their hired lungs as best they could’ in the Burgtheater (according to the Wiener Realzeitung), while accusations of artificiality and excess appeared in other newspapers (33). Opponents of the Italian troupe championed Dittersdorf, then preparing the German troupe's ‘rebuttal’ singspiel and arguably contributing to a publicity campaign at Mozart's expense. The back-and-forth could be subtle, but unmistakable, and timing was everything: Dittersdorf planted a favourable notice of his Ovid symphonies three days after Figaro’s premiere; the Wiener Realzeitung’s defence of Figaro appeared the day Dittersdorf's Der Apotheker premiered. Even Joseph's well-known decree about Figaro’s encores reveals not so much the opera's inherent value as the lengths to which the rivalry had escalated. One of the particular skills Woodfield brings to this project is a canny ability to read between the lines of his print sources, noting as much what is not said in a particular review as what is. His fluency in evaluating written accounts for partisan bias, imperial flattery and other subtexts (down to the significance of a single qualifier ‘true’) makes for a revealing perspective on an early corpus of opera criticism (47). To put it another way, Woodfield reads these newspapers as astutely as did their original readers.

After a survey of another operatic duel between the two troupes – Una cosa rara versus a revival of Die Entführung aus dem Serail – Woodfield turns in chapter 2 to the 1787–1788 season. Here again, a single musical work might find itself on opposite sides of the rivalry from year to year. The Singspiel troupe, for instance, staged a German translation of Fra i due litiganti, which Woodfield interprets not as an act of appropriation, but as ‘a partial admission of defeat from an ensemble tasked with developing a German musical repertoire at the National Theater’ (76). Meanwhile, Mozart was preparing Don Giovanni as part of the complicated and shifting festival itinerary for the wedding of Joseph's niece, the Archduchess Maria Theresia, to Anton of Saxony. Joseph's entry into the Russo-Turkish War prompted further chaos in the wedding plans, and the announcement of the imminent closure of the German troupe as a cost-cutting measure exacerbated the uncertainty. In tracing these events, Woodfield offers compelling hypotheses for local and imperial motivations behind familiar moments in Don Giovanni like the Act 1 finale toast and the Act 2 banquet scene (89–90, 94–95).

With the second (and final) closure of the National Singspiel, Dittersdorf left Vienna to court other centres, stoking the rivalry with Mozart via (among other offerings) his German version of the Figaro play. Chapter 3 departs from the microhistorical narrative for a long analysis of Die Hochzeit des Figaro, enumerating the many ways in which it invites comparison with Mozart's setting (106–107). Woodfield pays particular attention to the ways Die Hochzeit appears to satirize Figaro’s original cast, and how Dittersdorf's Cherubin might be understood as a caricature of Mozart himself. In the absence of a surviving score and any evidence of a staging prior to January 1789 in Brünn (for which we do not know the performers), it is difficult to know whether Dittersdorf had specific singers of his own in mind for a further layer of parody. These archival gaps also lead Woodfield to rely occasionally on rather oblique evidence to support his interpretative moves. Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to explore Dittersdorf's obscure singspiel as an item of ‘early commentary’ on Da Ponte and Mozart (106).

Chapter 4 revisits the 1787–1788 season discussed in chapter 2, this time from the perspective of the Italian troupe and the Vienna premiere of Don Giovanni. Woodfield situates the opera's lukewarm reception in the context of a ‘year of crisis for the Austrian Monarchy’, with the unfolding war taking a downturn for the Habsburg army, and frequent absences of the royal family at the theatre unnerving the public (163, 167). The rising costs of war prompted Joseph to announce the imminent closure of the opera buffa, less than a year after he closed the National Singspiel. This made room for the rise of the commercial theatres, and the emergence of the Theater auf der Wieden. In chapter 5 Woodfield details the restoration of the Italian troupe in 1789, as the Austro-Turkish war turned in Joseph's favour and he succumbed to a charm offensive by Da Ponte and others. The first opera to appear after this reprieve, Salieri's L'ape musicale, was a self-reflexive pasticcio designed to flatter Joseph's taste, and included references both to the Schönbrunn contest of three years earlier and to the most recent events in the war.

The book concludes with the eventful 1789–1790 season, which saw the fall of Belgrade in October, Joseph's declining health, Figaro’s third bow (this time as a ‘semipolitical’ festive work), the premiere of Così fan tutte (with its topical references) and Joseph's death. These events tumble over one another in chapter 6, as what Woodfield labels ‘the Josephinian era of opera’ draws to a close (229). Woodfield's brief Conclusion actually behaves more like a miniature seventh chapter, the 1791–1792 season beginning with Leopold ‘about to sweep away his brother's operatic order’ in favour of the commercial theatres (234). Die Zauberflöte showed Mozart's shrewd flexibility in courting imperial patronage, and while many have speculated how opera history might have changed had he lived past thirty-six, after reading this book one cannot ponder Mozart's fate without considering Leopold's as well.

In a way, the book's subtitle is somewhat misleading: it is by no means only about Mozart, and it is more an account of theatrical life than a study of operas themselves (with the extended analysis of Dittersdorf's Die Hochzeit des Figaro at the book's midpoint among the more fascinating exceptions). Cabals and Satires thus stands in subtle counterpoint to those interpretations of the comic operas of Mozart and his contemporaries that engage primarily with broader currents in Enlightenment thought, such as those by Stephen Rumph, Edmund Goehring, Charles Ford, Nicholas Till and others. Woodfield's most frequent interlocutors in the book are those who, like him, summon the Viennese archive to situate the operas in their immediate geographical and historical contexts, such as Dorothea Link, John Rice and Martin Nedbal. And while he modestly refrains from citing his own significant body of work on this repertory and period – most recently Performing Operas for Mozart: Impresarios, Singers and Troupes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) – Cabals and Satires offers another ‘overlay map’ of sorts. Woodfield began over ten years ago with meticulous source studies of the operas, their composers and librettists, moved on to their performers and troupes, and turns here to their ultimate audience member, Joseph. As Woodfield's network of ‘operatic conversations’ unfolds, one might read between its own lines. It quietly reminds us that none of these perspectives or methodological inclinations need be mutually exclusive; on the contrary, like the best map overlays, in the hands of a master cartographer they are mutually illuminating.