Leopold Mozart Violinschule

Leopold Mozart’s (1719–1787) Essay on a Well-Founded Instruction for the Violin is considered the most important German-language contribution to violin playing from the 18th century. All important aspects of violin playing are treated in a systematic and didactically reflective manner. The Violinschule, originally conceived as an instructional work for beginners but yet demanding, is highly regarded today as a source for music history, instrumental technique, and violin pedagogy.

The edition offers, for the first time, a text version of the Violinschule prepared according to scholarly criteria, which also takes advantage of the possibilities of a digital edition that is intuitively accessible not only to professional musicians, but also to amateurs. The entire text has been transferred into modern typeface and musical notation; at the click of a mouse, the user can navigate the text using either the original register or an index created on the basis of the text structure. A full-text search function is also available. High-resolution facsimiles of the original pages, synoptically displayed with the edited text, complement the online presentation. The text, captured in XML/TEI format, is available for download for all non-commercial purposes.

In addition to the first edition (1756), which is already fully accessible, the second edition (1769), revised by Leopold Mozart himself, is scheduled to go online in the first half of 2021. A synoptic view will then allow direct comparison of the two text versions as well as color-highlighting of differences according to various categories.

The project is supported by the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), Los Altos/CA.