Mozart and Italy

Mozart and Italy - Modern Reflections of Intercultural Dialogue in the 18th Century is the title of a cooperation project coordinated by the Association European Mozart Ways (EMW), which will be realized within the next two years.
The vision of the project is to raise awareness of the ways cultural exchange and dialogues have been key elements of creative innovation and excellence in Europe. The project centres on W.A Mozart to research and present the transnational dimension of his artistic development in the second half of the 18th century.

The project "Mozart and Italy" starts in June 2009 and will end in May 2011.The total budget of the project is estimated at € 400.000. Support from the EU Culture Programme covers 50% cofinancing of such costs, the maximum eligible amount. With a score of 30.5 of total achievable 35 points the project of the European Mozart is ranked in the upper third of the 87 projects selected in the category of cooperative ventures. According to the EU call, funding is reserved to projects with at least three cultural operators from at least three participating countries, realizing the project within a maximum period of two years.
 

Organizers of the project are the City of Augsburg, a member of the EMW that presents an annual extensive and established Mozart Festival, and City of Milan which has been the leading Italian member of the EMW and has supported the development of the multilingual digital publication of Mozart’s letters from Italy, and King's College London, which provides expertise in the field of music history, didactics and digital presentation.

The project comprises three closely connected parts:

The first part explores Mozart’s Italian journeys and is integrated into the 2010 MozartFestival in Augsburg - http://www.mozartstadt.de/en/index.aspx - with three specific project activities: a symposium and two special concerts. The concerts include one presenting a new work on the theme of Mozart and Italy, commissioned from a contemporary composer. A second concert in Augsburg will focus on Italian church music from Mozart's time, recreating the context that the composer directly experienced. For this modern-day premiere, an original 18th century church composition from Italy will be researched and revised by the specialist co-organisers from Italy, assisted by the experts from Austria as for example the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg and United Kingdom.
The musicologists of the consortium will also finalize and launch a new research database enabling online access in multiple languages to Mozart's Italian letters and promote the dissemination of the new tool through an experts' symposium during the Mozart Festival in Augsburg / DE.

The second part aims to expand an important initiative started in Italy, to provide a multilingual online publication of the Italian Mozart's letters with a searchable database on places, people and works quoted in the astonishingly vast, vivid and enlightening correspondence of Mozart and his family. The basic database including the Italian letters will be available mid of May on the Web portal of the EMW. While the creation, content management and enlargement of the database is not a part of the submitted project, the project implements measures to present the tool to prospective users (research specialists, musicologists, musicians, education professionals as well as the general public interested in Mozart and 18th century history), to facilitate its availability and use, and to elicit feed-back from the target groups for further expansion.

The third part will build on the 1st part of the project and create a new didactic approach to the presentation of Mozart within a European context and will be realized by two specialised research departments of the UK co-organiser, the "Centre for Computing in the Humanities" and the Department of Music at King's College London. This part centres on the research on questions as structures that made it possible in the 18th century to network while abroad through formalized social mechanisms, a revised consideration how journeys and residencies abroad were part of a systematic educational concept, comparative research on Mozart's journeys in relation to other composers of the period, the development of web-based model to present Mozart's journeys within both European and education contexts to the general public and the preparation of samples of webbased and multimedia teaching tools demonstrating an innovative approach to presenting the Mozart routes.

This work programme has been funded with support from the European Commission
This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.