J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Fragments by classical authors, whatever their species, are priceless. Among musical fragments,
those by Mozart certainly deserve full attention and admiration. Had this great master not left
behind so many completed works in every species, these magnificent relics alone would constitute an
adequate monument to his inexhaustible Geist. 1
In this remarkable letter, Constanze Mozart shows her grasp of two of the most
important cultural developments of her time—the tendency to view the present from
the standpoint of posterity, and the Romantic enjoyment of fragments for their own
sake—together with an impressively shrewd eye to the main chance.
Following the both the precept and the example of Friedrich Schlegel, 2
composers of the next century would indeed come to exploit the expressive and formal
potential of apparently fragmented structures. 3 It is, however, hard to disagree with
Ulrich Konrad when he argues that ‘with all this, and with the discourse on praxis and
theory of the “non finito” conducted since the end of the seventeenth century in the
visual arts, the Mozart fragments cannot be connected in any meaningful sense. As
aesthetic commodity the unfinished musical work simply did not exist.’ 4
What, then, was to be done with them? Incomplete musical works present a
problem that is not shared by the other arts. Although seventeenth-century
connoisseurs did in fact attach arms to the Venus de Milo and other damaged Classical
sculpture, 5 later centuries have had no difficulty accepting torsos, fragments, and ruins
1 Letter to Breitkopf & Härtel, March 1800, quoted in R. Kramer, review of Neue Mozart-Ausgabe X
(supplement) 30/4: Fragmente, ed. U. Konrad, Notes 61/1 (September 2004), 231.
2 Kritische Fragmente, 1797, and Athenäums-Fragmente, 1800.
3 See (for example) C. Rosen, The Romantic generation, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995), chapter 2, ‘Fragments’; M. Deppermann, ‘“Epideixis der Unendlichkeit”: Das Fragment in
der “ästhetischen Revolution” der Frühromantik’, Das Fragment im (Musik-)Theater: Zufall
und/oder Notwendigkeit? (Salzburg, 2002), ed. P. Csobádi, 56-80; J. Daverio, ‘Schumann’s systems
of musical fragments and Witz’, Nineteenth-century music and the German Romantic ideology (New
York: Schirmer, 1993), pp.49-88; and R. Satyendra, ‘Liszt’s open structures and the Romantic
fragment’, Music Theory Spectrum 19/2 (Fall 1997), 184-205.
4 Konrad, Fragmente, p.xv, quoted in Kramer’s review, 232.
5 R. S. Winter, ‘Of realizations, completions, restorations and reconstructions: from Bach’s “The Art
of Fugue” to Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 116/1
(1991), 97. Perhaps they felt the same discomfort in regard to the incomplete human body that we
do with incomplete musical works.
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