Winter 2011
RESEARCH

Punctuating Mozart

A prolific composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was also a prolific letter writer. The Open University's Dr. Benjamin Perl of the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts makes some interesting observations about Mozart's music-like punctuation and sentence structure.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of the most prolific and influential composers in the annals of classical music history. His corpus includes over 600 works including, symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic and choral music.

Mozart was also a prolific correspondent. His corpus includes hundreds of letters, mostly written to his father, but also to his wife, sister, friends, and to a lesser degree, various government officials. These were largely preserved by his wife, who, rightly so, considered this to be a treasure of similar worth to his musical manuscripts.

Almost no other musician in the annals of musical history corresponded with such frequency as did Mozart. Nor, and this is the added twist, did any other musician write with such unusual stylistic features. While Mozart, no doubt, would probably feel comfortable in the modern world of email correspondence, where stylistic informality and indeed, even grammatical errors pass the grade, his unique writing style is today considered 'extra-ordinaire' when compared to other letter writers from the 18th century.

Generations of scholars have studied Mozart's correspondence for purposes of biographical documentation, to better understand Mozart's creative style, and as a source of the Maestro's views and opinions on wide-ranging subjects.

Some scholars have also examined the very unusual 'creative style of writing' that was so endemically Mozart, but Dr. Benjamin Perl is the first to take a close look at Mozart's extensive use of dashes as punctuations.

Dr. Benjamin Perl, Senior Lecturer in the Open University's Department of Literature, Language and the Arts and one of Israel's leading experts on Mozart, while undertaking the task of translating Mozart's body of correspondence into Hebrew, also began to pay close attention to Mozart's most unusual use of punctuation in general, and the dash in particular not only "as a stylistic feature" but also in terms of "its affinity to musical phenomena."

Dr. Perl presented his preliminary findings, which will soon appear as part of his new book. Mozart and Language, at an international conference for musicologists recently held in Cremona, Italy to great acclaim.

Page: 1  2  3