Mozart: New Documents is a collaborative project for the digital publication of new Mozart documents not in Otto Erich Deutsch’s Mozart. Die Dokumente seines Lebens (1961) or its supplements (1978 and 1997). This website is intended as a working draft, and we welcome contributions and feedback from readers, who receive explicit credit and acknowledgment.
Digital publication allows us to develop the content of the site over an extended period. The site, which began in 2014, currently includes 195 documents with commentaries; well over 200 others are in progress. By the time the project is completed, it will include more than 400 new documents and addenda, and our research is ongoing. We hope eventually to move our site to a permanent home with an institutional base, and we would be happy to consider options for print publication of some or all of the documents and commentaries on this site.
Many of the documents that we publish here were found in digital collections—predominantly Google Books, but also many other digitized corpora. The ability to carry out text searches on large digitized corpora has allowed us to uncover references to Mozart and his works in publications that have not been systematically surveyed by previous Mozart scholars. Some items here even represent what is in effect a new category that we call “Mozart in Literature”— where “literature” is broadly construed to include not only plays, stories, and other fictional works, but also “non-fiction”: guidebooks, travelogues, and works of philosophy, aesthetics, theology, and pedagogy.
The links under Documents in the sidebar (1760–1779, 1780–1787, and 1788–1829) lead to chronological indexes for those periods. The site also includes indexes by category and Köchel number, as well as a full-text search. A PDF of each document and commentary can be generated using the link to the right of the “Commentary” heading. For a more detailed overview of the project as a whole, see our Introduction and Methods. To be kept up to date on newly added documents and substantial revisions to the commentaries, subscribe to our News feed. When the site is closer to completion, we plan to add several thematic essays.