In Mozart’s Words provides multilingual access to the voluminous correspondence of Mozart and his family - approximately 1,400 letters - that will progressively be made available on-line. The conceptual idea of the project is to create a univocal database of all references to people, places and musical works contained in the letters, facilitating the systematic search of all the occurrences in them.

The Mozart family letters are the most extensive and richly detailed correspondence of any composer of the eighteenth century or earlier and a fundamental source of information concerning Mozart's biography. Numerous details of his life--including details of the early tours and the composer's time in Vienna--are known only from the letters. By the same token, they also give information concerning his compositional activities, including otherwise unknown works. Even beyond illuminating the genesis, authenticity and chronology of his music, however, the letters also give evidence concerning its performance, including questions of ornamentation, scoring, tempo and the size of the orchestras he played with, in Salzburg and elsewhere.

This is why we chose to call the project In Mozart’s Words. The undertaking - of monumental proportions - will be carried on over several years and will be made public on the European Mozart Ways site in the form of thematically or chronologically homogeneous modules. In this initial stage, the website will host the 114 surviving letters sent by Mozart and his father Leopold to his mother Maria Anna and his sister Nannerl - plus a few other correspondents - during their three journeys to Italy, a fundamental destination of that epoch’s ‘Grand Tour’, considered so essential in the education of youth. The letters are given in the original German, and, for the moment, in Italian, English and French translations. Nevertheless, the aim of the website is to present them in other languages as they become available, even if only partially.

The letters, written between 1769 and 1773 when only Mozart and his father were travelling, are for the most part written by Leopold to his wife Maria Anna. In addition to detailing their various social and performing activities, they occasionally report on Leopold's plans--often cryptically described for censorship reasons--to secure a position for his son. The letters from Italy also include the first correspondence by Mozart himself, mostly in the form of vivacious and affectionate postscripts addressed to his sister.

In dealing with a correspondence, and one originating in the 18th century at that, a pure textual approach does not suffice to guarantee effective search results, not only because the spelling of many names, both personal and geographical, is often inconsistent from one letter to another, or has been modified down through the years, but also because in any correspondence - especially a family correspondence - many references remain implicit or allusive, the result of conventions or habits more or less established among the correspondents, or refer to previous letters, including ones that are now lost.

It is for this reason that each letter has been analysed with great attention, and, on the basis of the existing research available, every reference has been connected manually to a subheading of the multi-lingual authority file. Only a reference selection freed from its verbal formulation makes multi-lingual navigation possible, allowing the meaning of each citation to remain semantically unequivocal. Once a specific reference has been identified, the relevant dictionary entry remains constant, even if its formulation differs from one language to another, and thus it remains constant despite orthographic variants within the same language.

Not only do the spellings Innsprugg, Insprug, Insprugg always refer to Innsbruck, for instance, and the three spellings Mislievecek, Mislivececk, Mislivecek, Misliwetschek and Misliwetschek to Josef Mysliveček, but in phrases such as this, found in a letter of September 21, 1771 - ‘ich gieng ein paar stunde darauf zu den 3 Königen’ - (Leopold Mozart refers to the no-longer-existing hotel ‘Ai Tre Re’ in Milan), the link to the dictionary entry remains constant in every linguistic version: ‘Qualche ora dopo sono andato a trovarla ai 3 Königen ’ - ‘A few hours later, I went to call on her at the 3 Kings’ - ‘Je lui rendis visite quelques heures plus tard aux 3 Rois’. In other words, the choices made by different translators may be different (in this case, the question is whether to translate the name of the hotel or not), yet none of the versions has an influence on the identification of the reference.

Only in some limited cases have the choices of the translators had a slight influence on the running of the database. The sentence ‘die frl: Schwester der Oberhofmeisterin grafin Lodron’ cites only two people (Schwester and Oberhofmeisterin) while the translations cite three: ‘la sig.na sorella della moglie del maggiordomo maggiore, la contessa Lodron’, ‘La comtesse Lodron, sœur de l`épouse de notre premier majordome’, ‘Countess Lodron, the sister of our chief steward`s wife’. This is because the German tendency to feminize the profession of one’s husband, thus indicating his wife - as in this case - is less used in other languages or was not the choice of the translator. These differences are, however, few and have no determinant influence on the effectiveness of the search results.

Even when it is not possible to identify a reference, at least for now, a link is recorded in the database, connected to the univocal dictionary heading ‘not identified‘. In this way, the entry can be completed at some future time, if more information becomes available.
The various orthographic variants are nevertheless rendered accessible by a specific menu called ‘Original citations’, which includes records of the specific ways people, places or things are referred to: Amfiteatrum for the Arena of Verona, the nickname La Bastardella for the singer Lucrezia Aguiari, and certain specific jobs or positions, such as the Ambassador to Malta, but not without being informed that here the various linguistic versions might alter the results considerably though it is possible that various linguistic versions might call up different numbers of results. While the Italian publisher, for example, chose to respect the original spelling / wording, even when clearly wrong, the French publisher chose to use the correct and current spelling / wording. Thus, the ‘original citations’ in the French version will be limited to a decidedly smaller number of cases.

At this stage, the available resources for the project have not allowed us to add further information to the dictionary entries, sometimes even when such information, such as biographical details, is well known. We have thus limited ourselves - with very few exceptions - to the birth and death dates / places of the identified persons and links to official or very popular websites (for example, Wikipedia and Google maps) for places; the inclusion of additional information will be the next step in the project.

As a platform for disseminating ‘Mozart’, this site is infinitely expandable: aside from the identification of people, places and works, it can or will include links to a source catalogue, to recordings of Mozart’s works and the works of others, a complete iconographical and documentary record of Mozart’s life and times, links to the books Mozart read or was acquainted with, and perhaps even reconstructions of opera houses or concert halls where his music was performed. In short, everything that is relevant to Mozart can find a place here.

The numbering of the letters follows that of the standard, critical edition: Wilhelm A. Bauer, Otto Erich Deutsch and Joseph Heinz Eibl, Mozart. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1962-1975). The initiative is under the scientific direction of Cliff Eisen Professor of Music History at the King’s College, London.

In Mozart’s Words has been made possible thanks to the support of the Italian Committee Le Vie di Mozart, created by the Ministero Italiano per i beni e le attività culturali (MIBAC) as part of the Mozart 2006 celebrations (in cooperation with the historical Società del Quartetto of Milan) of the Milan Municipality, Cultural Direction, and European Mozart Ways itself.
The project is also based on long-time collaborations with several prestigious organizations, including the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg (which allowed to link Mozart’s works to the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe and made available electronic versions of the original texts, checked and revised by Anja Morgenstern); the publisher Gruppo Editoriale Il Saggiatore, who provided the yet-to-be published Italian translation by Elli Stern, Cesare De Marchi and Anna Rastelli; and the publisher of the French version, Flammarion (Correspondance. Lettres de Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, translated by Geneviève Geffray, Paris 1986). The English translation - there being no stylistically homogeneous and up-to-date integral version currently available - was commissioned expressly for this website from Stewart Spencer. Software developement is provided by Pegaso 96, Milano.

Of course, all texts are copyright protected.

Finally, some figures: the letters total 114, the places mentioned 173, locales within places 303, persons 452, Mozart’s works 42 and other composers’ works 50, for generating a total of more than 14,500 citations.