Volume 39, Number 3 · January 30, 1992
Friendly Corrections
By Charles Rosen
In response to Radical, Conventional Mozart
(December 19, 1991)
To the Editors:
Several readers have written friendly corrections to my article "Radical, Conventional Mozart," [NYR, December 19, 1991] for which I am very grateful. The emperor with whom Dittersdorf discussed Mozart was not (as I absurdly claimed) Franz-Joseph, but Joseph II. Mozart's sonatas were written for a queen, not an empress, of Prussia. The composer who may have influenced Mozart was Piccinni not Puccini: typesetters generally do not believe that there was a composer called Piccinni until one has corrected this several times in proof. (I remember making this correction three successive times in a book published by Faber and Faber, and only succeeded in imposing it by writing it large in red.) John Yohalem kindly remarked, among other points, that E.T.A. Hoffmann changed one of his middle names to Amadeus from Wilhelm, not Friedrich. A.D. Roberts reminded me that it was Edward FitzGerald, not Bernard Shaw, who said "People will not believe that Mozart can be powerful, because he is so beautiful."
Charles Rosen
New York City