Mozart and the Nineteenth-Century Parisian Press: The Musicography of Henri Blaze de Bury, 1834-1882

It is frequently stated that Mozart stands as a symbol for classical music at the beginning of the 21st century, and this is never more true than in the 250th anniversary of his birth (27 January 2006). Less frequently is it asked why this is so. An important range of answers may be offered by reference to the changing attitudes to the composer during the course of the last quarter millennium; these may be expressed in terms of performance, arrangement, impact on the world of belles lettres and critical appreciation.
Nineteenth-century France, which almost always means nineteenth-century Paris, boasted the most sophisticated musical culture in Europe supported by the most elaborate music press and by theatrical criticism that was noteworthy for the refinement of its musical knowledge. Perhaps the best known critic, Hector Berlioz, was one of the most controversial, but the only two journalists to receive careful modern editorial attention have been Berlioz himself and his close supporter, Joseph d'Ortigue. Modern views of any nineteenth-century musical phenomena, including Mozart, are therefore coloured by the powerfully expressed views of these two authors.

'Mozart and the 19th-Century Parisian Press: The Musicography of Henri Blaze de Bury, 1834-1882' attempts to give an alternative perspective both to our understanding of how Mozart was received by the most important European musical centre in the nineteenth century and to the more general world of Parisian musical journalism by examining the changing views on Mozart during the half century that Ange-Henri Blaze (dit Blaze de Bury; 1813-1888) wrote music criticism for the Revue des deux mondes (1834-1882). The project puts in place a complete machine-readable electronic corpus of Blaze de Bury's writings on music in order to permit an exhaustive account of not just what his views on Mozart were but how they changed over the course of the period during which his criticism was published.

The research represents an important contribution to two major subject areas: the discipline of Mozart-reception and the current enthusiasm for the nineteenth-century Parisian press. It provides an coherent view of the composer in the hands of a single critic for the first time, and in its presentation of a machine readable corpus (of around 700,000 words) of a critic distanced from the avant garde provides an important complement to existing studies either complete (as in the case of d'Ortigue) or ongoing (as in the case of Berlioz).

The results of the project will appear as a paper at a international conference in London, the report of that conference, an article in a refereed journal and as a open-access website where the entire writings on music by Blaze de Bury will be freely available for consultation and search.