On 22 Aug 2003 at 17:40, Paul Copeland wrote: > I want to thoroughly research many of Mozart's symphonies from a > theoretical viewpoint -structure, theme, harmony, form etc. > > One publication that comes up on the search engines is > > Mozart Symphonies. Context, Performance, Practice, Reception by Neal > Zaslaw. > > Has anyone read this publication?
Yes. I read it when it first came out. It is, far and above, the best complete study of Mozart's symphonic output ever written. It is very complete in its consideration of historical, source and contextual information for every symphony, and, quite rightly, discards a number of symphonies that have wrongly been included in Mozart's oeuvre for very, very poor reasons. > As it is quite expensive, I don't want to purchase it if there are > other publications out there, which are just as good. If your emphasis is on "structure, theme, harmony, form" then it won't be of much help, as it doesn't really systematically discuss those issues for all the symphonies. That is not to say that it avoids the subject -- it certainly doesn't, but Neal says things on the subject only when he has a larger point to make. And I must admit I don't quite agree with all his conclusions (his remarks on the later symphonies, in particular, verge on the untenable in the conclusions drawn out from his argument), but it's certainly a remarkable effort. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
