Leopold Mozart. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The year 1756 was a good one for Leopold Mozart, violinist at the Salzburg court: in January his seventh child, Wolfgang, was born, and his Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, the attempt at a fundamental violin school, came off the press. Of the two works, for a few decades, the second seemed the more important: it immediately became the standard violin manual in the German-speaking world, reprinted and translated, the natural companion of Quantz for the flute and of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Versuch for the keyboard. Three manuals in four years: mid-eighteenth-century musical Germany was putting all its practical knowledge in writing, and we still live off the interest.
The Violinschule is the unintended portrait of its author: systematic, demanding, witty in the cutting way of perfectionists. There is posture, bow, fingering, the trill; there is the celebrated dig at those who vibrate on every note as though they had a fever; there is the chapter on ornaments in which he orders the student to play the composer’s notes first and then, if need be, his own. And above all there is a serious pedagogical idea: the violin is not learned in pieces, it is learned inside the music, with taste and judgement, not with gymnastics alone. Baroque violinists today consider it one of their bibles, along with the fact, always striking, that its author still distinguished E flat from D sharp: his ear knew more notes than our keyboard does.
Then, as we know, the book was surpassed by the pupil. Leopold applied the method of the Violinschule to his son with a devotion we would question today: the childhood tours across half of Europe, the discipline, the bookkeeping, the pride and the control. The relationship between the two, over the years, went sour the way relationships between a manual and a genius do. But when you hear the precision with which Wolfgang writes for strings, the naturalness with which every passage falls under the fingers, you are also hearing the Violinschule, absorbed at home before he could read. The book sits in the Melos library, on the shelf of instruments and teaching. The son, on all the other shelves.