GÜNTHER G. BAUER, TRANSLATED BY RAY FLANAGAN MOZART: A GREAT LOVER OF GAMESBad Honnef: Karl Heinrich Bock, 2006 pp. 391, isbn978 3 87066 972 0

Abstract

A carnivalesque impulse repeatedly finds expression in Mozart's life and works. Various documents, most of them directly accessible to study, bear witness to his remarkable capacity for inventing personal entertainments. Foremost among these are the Bäsle-Briefe, with their rhetorical trick-work, his facetious entries in Nannerl's Tagebuch, accounts of practical jokes played on friends, and, as one might expect, a number of jests attached to a musical context, including the 'obscene' canons, the pantomime with music performed during a masked assembly, K446, the comical trio for soprano, tenor and bass with strings 'Liebes Manndel, wo ist's Bandel?', K441, and the satire on poor musicianship Ein musikalischer Spaß, K522. However, when it comes to Mozart's involvement with the established pastimes of his day-competitive play governed by well-defined rules and aims-the documentary record, with a few exceptions, offers little substantive evidence. This is hardly surprising: play is by definition a lived experience, and written records are hardly ever kept. In his book Günther Bauer takes up this challenge and attempts a comprehensive reconstruction of Mozart's gaming environment. The present English translation will bring his valuable discoveries to the attention of a wider readership. A games manual first published in the year of Mozart's birth makes a telling assertion: 'Taking part in games is such a common practice today, and in better circles such a necessary accomplishment, that one can hardly claim to be a proper society person if one is totally inexperienced in the art of playing' (224). Games did indeed form a permanent accompaniment to daily existence in eighteenth-century Austria, and Bauer investigates closely the principal types known to Mozart: (1) the games of Mozart's childhood, (2) shaftshooting in Salzburg, (3) card games, (4) billiards and skittles, (5) party games, (6) festivities and masquerade balls and (7) lotto. Since almost nothing can be said with any certainty about Mozart's nursery games, Bauer offers an analysis of the educational games Leopold employed with his grandson and presents a fascinating list of toys available for purchase in 1791. He also evokes the outdoor games probably enjoyed by Wolfgang and Nannerl, folk melodies they may have sung, the children they may have played with, the places they may have played in and the kinds of distraction that may have enlivened the long carriage journeys of their youth. In this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, readers may not warm to recurring qualifications (as so much necessarily remains uncertain) and the occasional unwarranted use of strong assertions (doubtlessly a result of the author's understandable enthusiasm). Footnotes often refer us to the author's previous articles rather than directly to a source, making it unclear what evidential support is being provided. In the main, however, Bauer's speculative reconstructions are entirely plausible. The second chapter, one of the most satisfying, provides a very full picture of shaf...