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
- 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)
- 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)