M ozart ' s O bviously C orrupt M inuet

The Romantic and Modern reception and reinterpretation of eighteenth‐century music stretches over a period much longer than that of the eighteenth century itself, in the process forming its own authenticity and norms. Modern editors of eighteenth‐century music must occasionally grapple with musical texts which appear to violate either the earlier or later standards. A minuet whose text seemed ‘obviously corrupt’ to the official editors of Mozart's keyboard sonatas would probably have seemed highly artful yet utterly normative to Mozart or his audiences. A focus on the norms of musical phrases was proposed by the Victorian author Violet Paget, writing under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. Her immersion in eighteenth‐century music at an early age, along with her training in the Italian tradition, gave her a unique position from which to comment on the differences between the musical culture of her own time and that of Mozart and his Italian models.