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MOZART AND THE PRACTICE OF SACRED MUSIC, 1781-91 a ...

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Seyn Sie nicht gar zu andächtig, gute Nacht. 99<br />

The explanation for this rather obscure riddle appears to be the following: illustrative<br />

engravings were often not bound into books, but were simply interleaved at the appropriate<br />

points. Mozart disturbed the order of the devotional pictures, wrote something on each of<br />

them, but then noticed that there were two copies of a particular engraving, and wished to<br />

keep one as a souvenir. The names at the end are, of course, “Mozart” and “Constanz” in<br />

reverse, another example of Mozart’s well-known love of wordplay.<br />

Unfortunately, the prayerbook is no longer extant, and the above quotation is only<br />

known from Nottebohm’s Mozartiana, which was based on documents in the Breitkopf und<br />

Härtel archives that are themselves presently unavailable. 100 Thus the form in which<br />

Breitkopf received the quotation is also uncertain. 101 The book may have been one of the<br />

numerous printed anthologies produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for<br />

private devotion, or it may have been handwritten, like Leopold Mozart’s surviving<br />

prayerbook. 102 The question of where and when Constanze received the book is presently<br />

impossible to answer. For Mozart’s entry, Nottebohm gave the date “Wien <strong>1781</strong>,” which<br />

was adopted without comment in MBA, yet one suspects this is merely a guess based on the<br />

99 MBA, iii.189.<br />

100 Gustav Nottebohm, Mozartiana. Von Mozart herrührende und ihn betreffende, zum grossen Theil noch nicht<br />

veröffentlichte Schriftstücke (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1880), 3. On the fate of the Breitkopf & Härtel<br />

archive, see Rudolf Elvers, “Breitkopf und Härtels Verlagsarchiv,” Fontes Artis Musicae 17 (1970): 24-8. Despite<br />

the roundabout transmission, the reliability of the other documents in Mozartiana suggests the note is<br />

authentic.<br />

101 There is no mention of any prayerbook in the printed materials section of Mozart’s Verlassenschaft; see<br />

Ulrich Konrad and Martin Staehelin, allzeit ein buch: Die Bibliothek Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts (Weinheim:<br />

VCH, 19<strong>91</strong>). Constanze’s Verlassenschaft, transcribed in Valentin, “Testament der Konstanze Nissen,” 141-5,<br />

does not mention books at all. There has been remarkably little study of Mozart and Constanze’s libraries and<br />

the fate of non-musical items after their owners’ deaths. A number of items from Mozart’s library do survive in<br />

A-Wn and D-W.<br />

102 In A-Sm; reproduction of one page in Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern<br />

(Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1961), 341.<br />

46

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