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Review: Digital Mozart Edition (DME)

2018; University of California Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2018.71.2.572

1547-3848

Neal Zaslaw,

Tree-ring climate responses

Like many online resources, the Digital Mozart Edition (DME) is a work in progress. That said, it already has much to offer, including material that for most people would previously have required a trip to one or more libraries, and much else not found in any library. The DME's plan of organization is explained on its home page as follows:1As of February 19, 2018, the links to four of the five subprojects were live; the exception was the fourth, "DME::Sources & Documentation." Of the four with live links, the first, NMA Online, is the most straightforward.As its name suggests, this subproject contains scans of the entirety of the Neue-Mozart Ausgabe, not only the 101 large-format, rose-colored volumes of music, which since 1991 have also been available in a twenty-volume, reduced-size, fire-engine-red paperback reprint. Not found in the twenty-volume reprint but included in the online version are all of the NMA's Critical Reports for the volumes of scores, and all twenty-six supplementary volumes but two (NMA X/35, Abt.1: Addenda and Corrigenda; NMA X/35 Abt.2: Indexes), which are listed as forthcoming. It seems remarkable (to me, at least) that such a costly edition, which is still in print, can be made available at no charge, thanks to generous foundation support.The NMA Online pages for choosing genres and locating individual works are provided in German, English, Spanish, and Japanese. Clicking on NMA Online (and agreeing to the terms of use) brings up a list of the generic categories by which the publication is organized:If one wishes to study, for instance, Le nozze di Figaro, one first clicks on "Series II: Theatre Music." There one encounters a lightly annotated list of Volumes 16 to 42 of the print edition, of which number 32 proves to be Figaro (see Figure 1). Clicking on the icons to the right of any one of the three volumes listed for Figaro brings up good-quality scans of its complete contents, any number of individual pages of which can be downloaded and printed. The red-colored "i" icon brings up a volume's introduction, the black music note icon the score, and the grey pages icon the Critical Report.The finales of Mozart's late operas are long and divided into musically distinct subsections. Figaro's act 4 finale contains 521 measures and is divided into five scenes that do not necessarily begin with the set piece for which the scene is best known. Since these five scenes and their set pieces are enumerated neither in the Köchelverzeichnis nor in the "Verzeichnis der Nummern und Szenen" of the NMA's scores, an attempt to locate one such section may serve to demonstrate how flexible (or not) this resource is.The scena ultima begins at measure 335 of the finale, Allegro assai, as the Count sings, "Gente, gente, all'armi, all'armi!" The opera's dénouement, however, occurs at a fermata, double bar, and tempo change to Andante (upbeat to measure 421), where the chastened Count sings, "Contessa, perdono!" At this point we could continue to pursue "Contessa, perdono!" by clicking on "The Marriage of Figaro vol. 2." There is, though, valuable information hidden behind the first line of the entry for Volume 32: "NMA II/5/16/1–2: The Marriage of Figaro Vols. 1–2." Clicking on it reveals that not all NMA scores are created equal, that between the first edition of 1973 and Ulrich Leisinger's Critical Report of 2007 there were a series of emended and unemended reissues:But back to "Contessa, perdono!" Clicking the score icon beside "The Marriage of Figaro vol. 2" brings up the beginning of act 3 (p. 341). If you happen to know that what you are searching for is found on page 578 (= p. 1104 in the paperback edition), then use the "Find page no." function at the top of the screen. Otherwise look at the three functions in tiny type at the extreme upper left: "Table of Contents," "Critical Report," and "Synopsis." The first of these leads to a detailed table of contents from which one can click on any musical number (nota bene, not scene) to be taken to the page in the score on which it begins. The act 4 finale appears as in Figure 2. Finally, we have a more helpful list of the contents of the finale, although a user would still have to know that "Gente, gente" is the lead-in in order to quickly locate "Contessa, perdono!"The standard loudspeaker icon next to the title of each musical number leads to a page containing a fully annotated bibliography of "216 Recordings [of Figaro] registered in the database of the Mozart Sound And Film Archives,"8 as well as a list of five recordings of the single musical number in question (four from Naxos Classics and one from Brilliant Classics), which can be listened to online via the DME site. Clicking on one of the six icons causes the NMA score of the number to appear on the screen and the chosen sound file to download and play. This arrangement—multiple recordings—tactfully deals with the need to avoid endorsing any particular version, however excellent, as some sort of quasi-official aural representation of the NMA, or indeed of the opera itself.From the DME's home page, by clicking on "DME::Librettos—Edition," we can find a list of twenty-five of Mozart's stage works. A click on Figaro brings up the screen shown in Figure 3. Any portion of this libretto-as-sung text can be highlighted and copied into another document; and by clicking on the "PDF download" button in the upper right-hand corner, the complete text can be acquired in a format not found in the printed NMA. This PDF version is headed by a caution that translates as follows:The loudspeaker icon next to the title of each musical section functions as explained above (in relation to the NMA Online tables of contents).The links across the top of the libretto pages ("Works," "Critical Edition," "Diplomatic Edition," and "Source Evaluation") lead respectively to the list of Mozart's stage works, a critically edited version of the libretto, a diplomatic transcription, and (currently in German only) an evaluation of relevant sources, musical and literary. This last section is remarkable for its range, which extends far beyond what can be found in the Critical Reports or the Köchelverzeichnis. The extent of the coverage is suggested by the table of contents for the sources that are here made available and evaluated (see Figure 4).10Wishing to discover if the libretto subproject could provide an easier, quicker way to locate the music associated with the Count's "Contessa, perdono!" (or other texts that initiate neither a scene nor a musical number) than had the NMA Online subproject, I pull down the menu labeled "Critical Edition." The results are shown in Figure 5. I click on "Text Set to Music (Score Text)," then on "Atto Quarto," and finally on "Scena ultima." There I find that every line of the sung libretto is clickable, leading to various annotations and a bibliographical accounting of the relevant sources for the critical edition. Having arrived at the scena ultima, I try a keyword search for "Contessa, perdono," without quotation marks, but am told "Phrase not found." I can see the words on the screen in front of me, so I try again with quotation marks. Again, "Phrase not found." Searching only "Contessa" takes me to her entrance cue, but not to the desired line of text. Searching "perdono" of course leads me to Susanna and Figaro's earlier mock-begging of the Count for forgiveness while Susanna is still disguised as the Countess. Finally, I remove the quotation marks from "Contessa, perdono," highlight the text of the whole scene, and it works. I imagine, therefore, that if I were able to highlight the entire libretto text, I could find any phrase I wanted. Although that may be possible, I could not figure out how to do it.This ambitious subproject of the DME, producing high-quality scans and diplomatic transcriptions of thousands of documents, is described as follows:Although this is very much a work in progress, a remarkable amount of material has already been made available online, as the editors of the project explain under "Project Status":The page concludes, "At the moment, 1128 documents are available online. Last Update: June 2016."12This subsection of the DME project has not yet been activated, nor does it have a link from the home page menu, and I have not been able to ascertain from what is online to date how far it has progressed. The sentence describing it in the English-language version of the "Project Outline" on the DME home page, quoted at the head of this review ("The digital services of the DME are supplemented by catalogs and databases related to the musical works and their sources including information on their history and reception"),13 is easier to grasp in the German version, which translates as "The DME's digital offerings are supplemented by work- and source-related catalogs and databases, including information on reception history."14 For now, those seeking information on sources had best use the Critical Reports. As for documents, the traditional compendium by Otto Erich Deutsch (NMA X/32) with supplement volumes by Joseph Heinz Eibl (X/31/1) and by Cliff Eisen (X/31/2) must serve.15 Recently uncovered documents are available in their original languages with English translations and profuse explanatory notes on a remarkable website, Mozart: New Documents, edited by Dexter Edge and David Black.16As if all of the above were not enough, the analog NMA will eventually be digitized in editable musical notation files and revised in various ways to form the online musical corpus of the DME as "DME: Music." So far, only the editorial guidelines are available,17 but the subproject is described on its opening page as follows:The language of the edition is to be English; important accompanying texts may also be available in German or in other languages.I am not competent to comment on the technical aspects of the encoding of the NMA as the basis for the DME. It seems clear, however, that if this subproject is carried to completion as promised, users will be able to generate scores and parts of any of the authentic and early manuscript sources and published editions, as well as mixing and matching them or creating new versions arranged to suit individual purposes—seemingly endless possibilities for presentation, visualization and screen rendering, annotation, analysis, and performance.For those interested in the reception history of Mozart, the site has even more to offer. Under the "Other Projects" tab on the far right of the home page menu is a link to "Mozart im Spiegel des frühen Musikjournalismus,"19 where texts from music, theatrical, and literary periodicals from the period 1782–1828 that mention Mozart or his work will be assembled. A first volume of the collected texts and references (offered in German only) covering 1782–1800 has been print-published,20 and this material (355 texts) is presented here in an online, searchable format. The editors of this subproject estimate that, when they have finished, they will have made more than a million documents available.Finally, the early stages of the "Digital Collections of the Bibliotheca Mozartiana" can be explored via a link not from the main menu of the DME home page but from within the text of that page's "Project Outline." Its goals are broad, as outlined in its opening description:This subproject offers a granular metadata search function that includes, among many other possibilities, six filter options: music prints, Mozart's library, books and journals, books from the collection of the Mozart family, the Mozart-Jahrbuch online,22 and libretti (see Figure 6). For the moment this ambitious, open-ended project is largely aspirational, with 1,950 items posted in these six categories combined.The Mozarteum's DME project is a spectacular display of archivalism on steroids, of an attempt to be complete, to "own" Mozart. It will without question provide welcome bases for any number of writing and research projects. It is also somewhat daunting in its sheer size. The well-known and widely understood advantages of digitized material's being endlessly searchable by names, concepts, or vocabulary of any sort will enable all kinds of new discoveries, assuming that users can figure out how to sort the wheat from the chaff. Perhaps, then, the only downside is that the great efficiency of such easy access to source material may encourage researchers to believe that they no longer need to explore the libraries, archives, and private collections of the world, thus forgoing certain types of serendipitous discovery that make historical research such an entertaining sport and that have been behind so many enlivening interpretations in musicology.