Description of The Notenbuch
Originally the Notenbuch was a bound volume comprising forty-eight pages of blank music paper, with eight staves on each page. Inscribed with the words Pour le clavecin (French: For the harpsichord), it was presented to Nannerl on the occasion of her eighth name day on 26 July 1759 (or possibly her eighth birthday, which fell on the 30th or 31st day of the same month). Over the course of the next four years or so, the notebook was gradually filled with pieces written out by Leopold and two or three anonymous Salzburg copyists. Wolfgang is thought to have written out four pieces. Curiously none of the pieces was inscribed by Nannerl herself.
In later years, twelve individual pages were removed from the notebook for one reason or another. Of these, four are now considered lost, but the remaining eight have been identified by Alan Tyson (1987):
- two pages in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris;
- one in the Museum Carolino Augusteum, Salzburg;
- two in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City;
- one in the Universitätsbibliothek, Leipzig;
- one survives only as a facsimile and consists of the opening measures of K. 5b;
- one, now in a private collection, consists of a single leaf containing the rest of K. 5b.
The four lost pages have been tentatively reconstructed using a variety of other sources (Nannerl's letters and Georg Nissen's biography of Mozart). It is believed that in its completed state the Notenbuch contained a total of 64 pieces (including exercises and unfinished compositions), of which 52 are in the surviving 36 pages of the book.
Wolfgang Plath (1982) has deduced the existence of five scribes, from a study of the handwriting in the Notenbuch. In addition to Leopold and Wolfgang, three anonymous scribes from Salzburg – known as Anonymous I, Anonymous II and Anonymous III – have been identified. Numbers 58 and 61, thought to be in the four missing pages, are known only from Nissen's material; Plath assumed that these two pieces were copied out by Leopold, who was responsible for more than half the contents of the Notenbuch.
The Notenbuch provides evidence of the collaboration between the young Wolfgang and his father. For example, number 48 is an arrangement of the third movement of Leopold's D major serenade, but the trio also appears as Menuet II in Wolfgang's Sonata K. 6.
The Notenbuch is also useful in providing evidence of Leopold's approach to teaching music. The tables of intervals show that he taught music theory to his children from the start. It seems that he also taught composition from the outset, by means of a given bass line, a melody to be varied, a melody to be continued, and a structural model.
The earliest compositions by Wolfgang are written in Leopold's hand; the father's gentle suggestions for amendments came later.
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