Neue Mozart-Ausgabe

• 1. Introduction

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  H. C. Robbins Landon once insisted that the Vienna Philharmonic use the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe for a series of recordings of Mozart's symphonies. He described the edition as "an absolute necessity if we are to perform Mozart correctly." That insistence reflects a standing the NMA had built across decades of scholarly labor. Published from 1956 to 2007, the edition fills 132 volumes and contains 25,000 pages of music. Ten series divide those scores into 35 work groups, and 8,000 pages of critical commentary travel alongside the musical text. Why did building this edition require more than fifty years? And why did some editors have to work from pre-war photographs because the original manuscripts were out of reach?

• 2. What Came Before

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  The Breitkopf & Härtel complete works edition of Mozart that preceded the NMA was published between 1877 and 1883, with supplements continuing until 1910. That older project is sometimes called the Alte Mozart-Ausgabe, or Old Mozart Edition. Wolfgang Rehm, one of the NMA's editorial directors, put the new project's ambitions plainly in a written statement. He declared that the NMA aimed to offer "the latest state of philological-musicological procedure as well as practical knowledge (particularly with regard to performance) of Mozart's creative production." In plain terms, the edition was designed to serve two purposes at once: to document what Mozart actually wrote and to inform how that music should be performed. Bärenreiter-Verlag took on the task of publishing the edition, and each music volume was paired with its own separate critical commentary. That pairing of score and scholarly apparatus set the NMA apart from any earlier attempt to gather Mozart's work in one place. The Berlin State Library in Berlin held what was described as the largest single collection of Mozart autographs. For decades, NMA editors could not access it.

• 3. Lost Manuscripts

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  Stanley Sadie described the central difficulty plainly. The NMA's work was, in his words, "hampered by the removal in World War II and the unavailability until 1980 of most of the largest single collection of Mozart autographs, that of the Berlin State Library, Berlin." That collection had been moved during the war and stayed out of reach for decades. Ludwig Finscher ran into this directly when he prepared his NMA edition of The Marriage of Figaro. That volume appeared in 1973, but Finscher could only access the first two acts of the autograph score. The remaining acts were unavailable. Wolfgang Rehm faced a sharper version of the same problem when he edited the Piano Concerto No. 27, K. 595. The autograph was not accessible in 1960, when the NMA volume was due for publication. Rehm's solution was a pre-war photographic reproduction of the manuscript provided by the pianist Rudolf Serkin, whose copy had been made before the wartime disruption. That photograph became the working document for a critical edition of one of Mozart's final piano concertos. Even after the Berlin autographs became accessible again in 1980, volumes already published could not easily be revised. Landon later noted that newly discovered manuscript sources had since made even the NMA's edition of the Linz Symphony out of date.

• 4. The Ornamentation Question

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  Frederick Neumann's book Ornamentation and Improvisation in Mozart raised pointed objections to some of the NMA's editorial choices. Neumann's focus was the edition's suggestions for vocal cadenzas, which he found, in several cases, misjudged. His critique was not a wholesale rejection. Neumann acknowledged that parts of the ornamentation guidance were genuinely helpful, and in his preface he wrote that, where he could not access primary sources himself, the NMA "offered an indispensable supplement." That phrase from a critic, offered in the preface of a work expressly challenging the NMA, reveals how thoroughly the edition had embedded itself in Mozart scholarship. Neumann's objections were specific to one area of performance practice. The documentary and textual work of the NMA sat beyond the scope of his critique. What would change in the years after Neumann wrote was not the edition's content but something far simpler: who could get to it.

• 5. Into the Digital Age

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  On the 12th of December 2006, scans of the vast majority of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe became available online. The platform was named the DME, for Digital Mozart Edition, and it offered the scores in JPEG and PDF format. The service was organized by the International Mozarteum Foundation in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute. For most of the NMA's life, the edition had been accessible mainly in large hardbound volumes held by music libraries. Bärenreiter had also begun publishing portions of the NMA in paperback, extending its reach somewhat. The digital release was a different kind of change. Anyone with an internet connection could now open the same scores that had previously required a trip to a specialist library. The 2006 release covers the vast majority of the NMA, not every volume. For those remaining portions, the edition is still best encountered in the stacks of a music library, in the same form that greeted scholars when the first volumes arrived half a century earlier.