The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783-1792

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Preface
1 Josephinian Theatre: Setting the Stage
2 c. Performance Calendar of the National Court Theatre in Vienna, 1783-92
3 Le soir au theatre: From the Diary of Count Carl Zinzendorf, 1783-92
4 Transcriptions from the Theatre Account Books
The Performing Companies of the Court Theatre
The Subscribers to the Burgtheater
5 Josephinian Theatre: Some Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

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The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna provides a valuable context for Mozart's career as an opera composer in Vienna by investigating the operation of the court theatre under Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II. The author brings together a large number of hitherto unavailable archival sources, namely the diary of Count Karl Zinzendorf (from which transcriptions have been made of all passages that address the music and theatre in Vienna from Easter 1783 to Easter 1792); theatre account books (with transcriptions of payment records for all the salaried performing personnel as well as the semi-annual lists of subscribers to the boxes in the theatre); and the theatre posters, almanacs, newspapers, and records kept by the theatre administration, which have been compiled by the author into a performance calendar. The final section of the book rounds out the picture of Josephinian theatre with a discussion of the theatre's management and an analysis of the attendance figures.

Reviews

The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna is not a book to be read from cover to cover. It is much more useful than that, since it is destined to be a basic reference tool for opera scholars, indeed social historians too, working on opera in Vienna in the 1780s and 1790s. It fulfils three fundamental needs. Firstly, it provides a calendar of performances for the period 1782-92 that surpasses in detail and coverage that found in the hitherto unrivalled work of the two theatre historians, Franz Hadamovsky and Otto Michtner; the theatres include the two summer palaces of Schoenbrunn and Laxenburg as well as the two court theatres in the city itself, the Burgtheater and the Kaerntnertortheater; also, details of the many benefit concerts during Lent are systematically presented for the first time

Secondly, it includes all the references in the diaries of Karl Zinzendorf to musical and theatrical performances in Vienna during the same period. Although the documentary value of the Zinzendorf diaries has been appreciated since the 19th century, their sheer size - 76 volumes covering the social life of a music-loving aristocrat in Vienna from 1752 to 1813 - and perhaps the rather laconic nature of the entries themselves - waxing eloquently did not come easy to Zinzendorf - have always defeated any plans to publish them in a modern edition. Historians of all kinds have been through the material for specific purposes several times, and there have been editions of portions of the material before, but Link's collection is especially welcome for her copious and informative footnotes

Thirdly, the book includes transcriptions of payments to singers, players, librettists, copyists and other personnel who worked at the court theatres during this period, plus subscription lists of those who attended. Link's introductions to her material and her summary remarks on the makeup of theatrical life in Vienna during the reign of Joseph II are models of clarity and, for anybody who has had experience of working in the tangled web of Viennese archival sources, objects of envy too. By an appropriately provocative coincidence, three of the most valuable Mozart books discussed above (those by Eisen, Halliwell and Link) are published by Oxford University Press. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, OUP decided to shut its UK music book division last summer

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