Awards

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 2023 Award will be for the best book or edition published in 2021 or 2022.

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 2022 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award goes to Dr. Martin Nedbal for his article, “Heinrich Wilhelm Haugwitz and the Reception of Mozart’s Operas in Early Nineteenth-Century Moravia,” published in Musicologica Brunensia (volume 56, no. 1; 2021). Dr. Nedbal’s work is a detailed study of a neglected but important set of sources—the archival records connected with the musical activities of the Moravian Count Heinrich Wilhelm Haugwitz. In the early nineteenth-century, Haugwitz hosted a large number of musical events centered around Mozart’s operas at his castle in Náměšť nad Oslavou in the Vysočina Region of Moravia. These events were unusually well documented, and include meticulous financial records, as well as orchestral scores and other performance-related sources. Dr. Nedbal postulates that these materials were sourced not only from Vienna and Prague, but also from a previously overlooked copyist’s workshop in Brno. The location of these important archives in Moravia represents a newly discovered and non-canonical set of sources for Mozart’s canonical opera repertory. In considering the implications of these sources in the past and the present, Dr. Nedbal uncovers a number of cultural and political reasons that likely led to neglect of the Haugwitz materials by scholars. In advocating for their importance, he not only synthesizes a broad range of cultural, political, textual, and musical analyses, but also offers a revelatory appreciation of how scholarly themes and priorities may be determined by so-called “extrinsic” factors.

Winners of the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award

Cover of Instrumental Music in an Age of Sociability