Marjorie Weston Emerson Award
The Mozart Society of America invites nominations for the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award, a $500 prize given annually for outstanding scholarly work on Mozart published in English during the two previous calendar years. The Award will be given in alternate years to books and editions, and to essays and articles. The 2026 Award will be for the best essay or article published in 2024 or 2025.
The selection is made by a committee of Mozart scholars appointed by the President of the MSA, with approval from the Board of Directors.
The Society reserves the right not to award the prize in a given year.
The 2025 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award goes to Katharina Clausius for her book Opera and the Politics of Tragedy: A Mozartean Museum (Boydell & Brewer, 2023). This year’s award recognizes a finely crafted interdisciplinary study, a book that throws light on the intellectual atmosphere of eighteenth century France by investigating the pervasive influence of François Fénelon’s novel Télémaque (1699) on literature, the visual arts, and opera, pertinently for this book on the librettos of Mitridate and Idomeneo. The author’s extensive exploration of Telemacomania, largely unknown in opera studies, goes far in elucidating aspects of both Mozart operas, particularly Idomeneo. In their analysis of its score, the author’s emphasis on the predominance of the visual element should be of interest to today’s directors and scenic designers. The book itself is organized around the conceit of a museum exhibition, which makes for a lively presentation and not incidentally also emphasizes the visual element.
Winners of the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award
- 2025: Katharina Clausius, Opera and the Politics of Tragedy: A Mozartean Museum (Boydell & Brewer, 2023).
- 2024: Dorian Bandy, “Thema da capo: Another Look at Mozart’s Embellishments,” Eighteenth-Century Music 19/1 (2022): 37–57.
- 2023: Danuta Mirka, Hypermetric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791 (Oxford University Press, 2021)
- 2022: Martin Nedbal, “Heinrich Wilhelm Haugwitz and the Reception of Mozart’s Operas in Early Nineteenth-Century Moravia,” Musicologica Brunensia (volume 56, no. 1; 2021)
- 2021: W. Dean Sutcliffe, Instrumental Music in an Age of Sociability: Haydn, Mozart and Friends (Cambridge, 2020)
- 2020: Sarah Eyerly, “Mozart and the Moravians,” Early Music 47/2 (2019): 161-182
- 2019: Edmund Goehring, Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past: An Essay on Mozart and Modernist Aesthetics (University of Rochester, 2018). Now available as an Open Access eBook!
- 2018: Austin Glatthorn, “The Imperial Coronation of Leopold II and Mozart, Frankfurt am Main, 1790,” Eighteenth-Century Music 14 (2017): 89-110
- 2017: Edward Klorman, Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works (Cambridge, 2016)
- 2016: Justin Lavacek, “Mozart’s Harmonic Design in the Secco Recitatives,” Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory 22 (2015): 63-97
- 2015: Matthew Riley, The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart (Oxford, 2014)
- 2014: Nicholas Baragwanath, “Mozart’s early chamber music with keyboard: traditions of performance, composition and commodification,” in Mozart’s Chamber Music with Keyboard, edited by Martin Harlow (Cambridge, 2012)
- 2013: Simon P. Keefe, Mozart’s Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion (Cambridge, 2012)
- 2012: Roman Ivanovitch, “Mozart’s Art of Retransition,” Music Analysis 30/1 (2011): 1-36
- 2011: Daniel Heartz, Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 (Norton, 2009)
- 2010: Dorothea Link, “The Fandango Scene in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 133/1 (2008): 68-91
- 2009: Ian Woodfield, Mozart’s ‘Cosí fan tutte’: A Compositional History (Boydell, 2008)
- 2008: Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (California, 2007)