Mark my words mother, in year's to come I will be ont tinternet!
It has been a long year for Mozart lovers. Choc full of both unimaginative anniversary programming and fabulous, groundbreaking music making, anyone would think that the party, which began back in January, would by now be well and truly over. But it seems like the best has been left until last.
The International Mozart Foundation has launched a website that provides free access to digitised copies of Mozart's complete works; and not just any edition, but the masterpiece of half a century of Mozart scholarship that is the NME - no, not the New Musical Express, august journal though it is and founded some three years before the New Mozart Edition. Prepared between 1955 and 1991, the Barenreiter Neue Mozart-Ausgabe is not only a model of its kind, it's also the primary source of documentary information about Mozart's composition: from the correct chronology of the composition of Don Giovanni to the different kinds of paper on which he cobbled together La Finta Giardinera, you can find it all in the NME.
The site launched a week ago today, since when it has received more than a million visitors, one of which was me, this very morning. I tried and tried last weekend to get through the traffic jam, without success, and for the rest of this week my internet connection has been dead (thank you, Talk Talk). But this morning's brief browsing has already born considerable fruits: for the Mozart lectures I'm preparing to give next term, I now have a complete set of neatly printed hand-outs, something which, with the printed editions - handsome beast that it is - would have taken hours of wrestling with recalcitrant photocopiers and unforgivingly stiff bindings.
The site is a simple one, and the quality of the pdf reproductions is not the very best - but then the point is to improve access to, not replace, the printed edition. There is a comprehensive search function covering both scores and commentaries, and the excellent index, organised by genre, makes browsing a breeze.
In short, it does exactly what it says on the tin - which is a slight problem given that the tin's in German - and is pretty much exactly the kind of thing for which the internet was invented.
Let's hope the other music publishers - until now just plain terrified of the web and its can of copyright worms - will follow suit. But in so far as Mozart is currently a big part of it, my life, like that of James Blunt, is brilliant.
