http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/15/arts/15ARTS.html
MOZART BY ITS RIGHTFUL NAME
A Mozart mystery has been solved at last. So says the
musicologist Michael Lorenz, an expert on the Viennese music
of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the proof of
the pudding will be served on Thursday in Vienna when the
pianist Robert Levin sits down to join Sir Roger Norrington
and the Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart to play Mozart's
piano concerto in E-flat (K. 271) for the first time under
its proper name. For more than a century, Dr. Lorenz says,
the identity of the French pianist for whom the young Mozart,
above, wrote the piece has baffled Mozart scholars, and the
work has been known as the "Jeunehomme" Concerto. Dr. Lorenz
says that jeune homme, or young man, a reference to Mozart,
was the name given to it by a pair of French scholars in a
1912 biography because they couldn't identify the woman for
whom he actually wrote it. After that, he says, scholars
refrained from further research. Mozart, in a letter to his
father, Leopold, after finishing the concerto in January 1777,
referred to the pianist as "jenomy," and Leopold referred to
her as "Madame genomai." Dr. Lorenz says the mystery woman
was actually Victoire Jenamy, a daughter of Jean George
Noverre, a famous dancer who was one of Mozart's best friends.
Dr. Lorenz says a bit of research in the City Archive of
Vienna last year established that Victoire was an excellent
pianist, and it was she who commissioned the concerto in
Vienna in 1776. Adieu Jeunehomme. Enter, for the first time,
the "Jenamy" Concerto. LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Michael Lorenz <[log in to unmask]>
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