Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

by Anna Alberati

Mozart sources in the Casanatense library

The mysterious, the sweetest, the disturbing, the light, the profound, the joyful, the extraordinarily sublime and the extraordinarily human, the genius of music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the source of absolute, perfect happiness for all music lovers.

The 250th anniversary of his birth in this year 2006 is and will be celebrated in various ways. A library cannot fail to point out the music that is part of its precious heritage of manuscripts and printed editions, highlighting not only the Mozartian sources present but also their origin, because it tells the passions, antipathies, choices and activities of those who had this music in their private libraries, to preserve it, study it, perform it.

In the Casanatense Library the presence of Mozart sources is modulated in various ways depending on the different Funds that characterise the structure of the entire Musical Fund.

The Baini Collection. It sees in its almost complete integrity the private library of an important music historian of the first half of the 19th century, the abbot Giuseppe Baini (1775-1844), very interested in the study of polyphony but capable of acquiring music of a very varied genre. There are few compositions by Mozart, especially because this composer was not part of the interests or knowledge of the abbot, director of the Sistine Chapel.
In fact, it is precisely to him that Hector Berlioz refers in his Mémoires (published in 1831, in Italian translation in 1945), in the midst of a description full of contemptuous sarcasm of musical life in Rome, citing the following episode as a clear example of the incredible narrow-mindedness and cultural closure of Roman society in the first half of the nineteenth century: “A cultured abbot of the Sistine Chapel told Mendelssohn one day that he had heard talk of a young musician of great promise, called Mozart”.

Baini was, in fact, “a curious apparition” of the 19th century, as he lived in this period, but was only interested in the music of the 16th century: he claimed that music, after Palestrina’s death, “had unfortunately taken a disheartening decline”, he considered only that composed in the 16th century to be true music and, moreover, he did not understand the music of his time at all, particularly instrumental music.


Baini did know Mozart, however, since two printed Mozart sources are present in his music collection: the Mass for 4 Voices and the Requiem Mass, printed in Offenbach am Main in 1840 and 1827 respectively, a gift from Ferdinand Hiller (Frankfurt s. M. 1811-Cologne 1885).
These (composer, conductor, pianist and music critic of some fame) in his second trip to Italy (1840-42) studied the ancient Italian sacred music under the guidance of the abbot Baini. Admired as a performer and active as a promoter of culture, he also organized some concerts in Rome, during one of which he made the Romans listen, for the first time, to the opening symphony of the Magic Flute.

Both editions contain handwritten dedications by Hiller, which show the student’s genuine respect and affection for his master: Offered to the Lord Abbate Baini as a sign of deep esteem and affection. Francof. 6-8-43. Ferdinand Hiller and To the Most Reverend Lord Abbate Baini his devoted Ferdinand Hiller. Francof. 8-6-43.

Among the manuscripts, however, there are some compositions (7 pieces) included in four miscellaneous manuscripts, dated around the first twenty years of the 19th century: three of these had been written for educational use by two ladies who were piano amateurs, the Poloni sisters, and they include, among other things, the transcriptions of 3 arias from Don Giovanni, which certainly testify to the interest aroused by the performance of this opera (the first performed in Rome).
Performed at the Teatro Valle in June 1811, it was one of the events organised in honour of the birth of Napoleon’s son, the King of Rome, an event that could be celebrated thanks to the absence of strict papal censorship at that time in history.
The following are some piano pieces, including a Walzer which seems to be the only source (indicated by Köchel, author of the Mozart thematic catalogue, with the n. Anhang C.29.22).

The Sgambati Archive. Arrived at the Library in 1995, it shows that the composer, pianist and conductor Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914) not only had editions of Mozart’s compositions in his musical collection, but that these were for him a tool for study and work. Evidence of this is both the numerous handwritten annotations present in various Mozart editions, and the information present in the concert programmes, which recount his long and intense activity as a concert performer, starting with the programme of a Matinée Musicale, to be held in a hall at Vicolo del Vantaggio n. 1 on Wednesday 10 December 1862 at 2 hours and a half, where together with a Beethoven Trio and a Haydn Quartet, Mozart’s Quartet in G minor for piano, violin, viola and cello was performed, with Sgambati, Ramacciotti, Rosati and Ruspantini.

It should be noted that in the musical panorama of the city of Rome in the first half of the nineteenth century, instrumental music – and in particular the repertoire of foreign authors – was almost completely absent from theaters and concert halls. The first attempts to have this type of music performed and heard were those begun in the 1960s by the violinist Tullio Ramacciotti, the very young pianist Giovanni Sgambati and the violinist Ettore Pinelli. Young, progressive and lively nonconformist, the three realized their desire for modernity and their passion for chamber music through a generous concert activity performed in small halls in front of a not large, but decidedly select audience, made up almost exclusively of foreigners, travelers, and a few Roman intellectuals and music lovers. In 1881 Sgambati created La Società del Quintetto, which performed in Rome at the Sala Ducci and especially at the Sala Dante. Then a royal patent allowed the group to change its name to Quintet of the Court of Her Majesty the Queen: the consequence was that from 1895 its activity took place both in the Sala Umberto in public concerts and in private concerts at the Quirinale Palace, in front of Queen Margherita and the nobles of the court.

Some programs, printed for these concerts, indicate some evenings dedicated exclusively to Mozart and his chamber music:
– March 13, 1895
Trio No. 3 in E major for piano, violin and cello, Fantasy and Sonata in C minor for piano, Quartet in C major for two violins, viola and cello;
– March 10, 1898
Trio No. 3 in E major for piano, violin and cello, Quartet No. 5 in A major for two violins, viola and cello; – April 5, 1898:
Quartet in G minor for piano, violin, viola and cello, Quintet in A major for clarinet, two violins, viola and cello;
– April 17, 1900
Trio No. 3 in E major for piano, violin and cello, Sonata No. 6 in F major for piano, Quintet in A major for two violins, clarinet, viola and cello;
– March 23, 1907
Trio in E flat major for piano, clarinet and viola, Quartet in C major for two violins, viola and cello;
– March 16, 1908
Sonata No. 17 in A major for piano and violin, Quartet in D minor for two violins, viola and cello, Trio No. 3 in E major for piano, violin and cello.

Don Giovanni engraving on the frontispiece

The Costaguti-Servanzi Collection. Arrived at the Library in 1999, it is a collection of music gathered so that it could be performed by the amateurs of the two noble families, and also includes music by Mozart written or transcribed for an ensemble that includes violin, viola and cello, for the events of small chamber concerts: the elegant and precious editions are all from the end of the eighteenth century, printed by the chalcographic workshops of Vienna, Paris, London.

The Antiques Purchases of 1993 and 1995 allowed the Library to acquire the printed editions of the complete scores of four theatrical works: Così fan tutte, Le Nozze di Figaro, La Clemenza di Tito, all published (with chalcography technique) in Paris by Frey in 1822, and Il Don Giovanni, published (with lithographic technique) in Leipzig in 1801.
The first printed edition of the work is enriched by an evocative engraving on the frontispiece illustrating the protagonist, Don Giovanni, grabbed by the Commendatore, a copperplate engraving by Johann Friedrich Bolt based on a drawing by Vincenz Georg Kininger.
The first three scores were part of a famous 19th-century music collection, the Library of St. Michael’s College in Tenbury, which included the private collection of Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley, composer, theorist and professor of music at Oxford; while the fourth score belonged to the contemporary musicologist Remo Giazotto. All very beautiful and rare editions, evidence of the interest in Mozart of two bibliophiles, distant in time and space, but both attentive and intelligent music collectors.

Finally, in the theatrical collection of the Casanatense Library, the old editions of the librettos of Mozart’s theatrical works are conspicuously missing: in addition to the French translation of Don Giovanni (1838) and The Marriage of Figaro (1828), there is only one late edition (1867) of an (almost) complete libretto in the original language: Don Giovanni ossia Il dissoluto punito, one of Mozart’s most beautiful operas, one of the three splendid Italian operas written in perfect harmony by Mozart on the librettos of Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838), librettist and poet, with a long, adventurous and dissolute life, as he himself recounts in his Memoirs (New York 1823-27, Rari 144-145).

As a conclusion to these brief notes we would like to add the beautiful words of Giorgio Pestelli on Mozart’s music:
“A true internal revolution, which extended the communicative possibilities of music to unknown frontiers. Mozart’s oscillation between Gemütlichkeit (cordiality) and Sehnsucht (nostalgic longing) is only the most metaphysical of the ambivalences bred by his language: tragedy and comedy, learned and gallant; demonic streben and unconditional abandonment to events, to the beauty of the present; aristocratic cold, tired solitude and popular extroversion pushed to the point of the most scandalous hedonism; everything that was divided and classifiable is put in reciprocal relation, and from this fusion we arrive in the end at that joy with a lump in the throat that is the hallmark of the last Mozart.”