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Mozart online
This past January marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the most beloved composers in the history of Western music. Mozart's music and image have permeated popular culture—not only through frequent concerts, but also via movies, television, and chocolates and other commodities displaying his likeness. Throughout this jubilee year, numerous worldwide commemorative events have taken place to celebrate the enduring legacy of this brilliant but enigmatic musician.
Austria's Mozart 2006 (http://www.mozart2006.net
/deu/index.html) exemplifies such a multifaceted celebration, announcing the yearlong calendar of museum exhibitions, opera and concert performances, galas and symposia pertaining to perhaps its most renowned citizen.
Mozart's musical oeuvre consists of well over 600 compositions from age 5 until his death 30 years later. His music comprises all genres of the period, including operas, sacred works, symphonies, dances, piano works, concertos and chamber pieces. Mozart's entry in Grove Music Online (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources
/newgrove.html), UB access only) includes a complete works-list divided into forms of composition, in addition to informed and detailed essays on his life and musical style. Like the works-lists of every other major composer listed in Grove, this includes the year and place of composition, the key and instrumentation. Moreover, the Köhel number unique to each of Mozart's works is enumerated. Incidentally, if you wish to view the list of works in Köhel order, you can go to Classical Net (http://www.classical.net/music
/composer/works/mozart/, although Grove provides significantly more information.
Through such popular dramatizations as Peter Schaffer's play and the subsequent film, "Amadeus" (see the Internet Movie Database listing of this title at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086879/), Mozart has been portrayed as a vulgar, excessive womanizer who was inexplicably gifted with genius but ultimately undermined by the jealous but mediocre composer-rival Antonio Salieri. While this makes wonderfully compelling theater and is loosely based on factual incidents, it is nowhere near an accurate portrayal of either man, as A. Peter Brown suggests in his essay "Amadeus" and Mozart: Setting the Record Straight (http://www.mozartproject.org/essays
/brown.html). While the true explanations regarding Mozart's seemingly infinite creativity, his dealings with Salieri and the causes and circumstances of his early death are still under scholarly investigation, Brown successfully debunks many of the myths that Schaffer's play perpetuates.
In the1990s, researchers claimed that exposure to Mozart's music significantly improves cognitive abilities in early childhood development. This theory has led to the marketing of "Baby Mozart" and similar products marketed toward ambitious parents. In recent years the "Mozart effect" has been hotly contested, and Martin Jones of Indiana University separates facts from fallacies at Human Intelligence: Mozart Effect (http://www.indiana.edu/~intell
/mozarteffect2.shtml). Other articles relating to this scientific controversy (and countless others on Mozart) can be located via UB's online periodical databases The Music Index (http://ublib.buff-
alo.edu/libraries/e-resources/musind.html), International Index to Music Periodicals (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries
/e-resources/iimp.html), and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/rilm.html).
If you wish to sample Mozart's music online, look no further than the Naxos Music Library (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries
/e-resources/NAXOS.html), another of UB's online resources. Entering "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart" in the keyword search box will retrieve close to 600 recordings from Naxos' catalog, which are available for streaming. Of course you also can add title entries to your search if you are seeking specific compositions.
We cannot guarantee that listening to Mozart will automatically raise your grade-point average, as "Mozart effect" advocates maintain, but at the very least it could enrich some of your leisure time, as it has for music lovers for the last two centuries. Happy 250th birthday, Wolferl!
—Rick McRae, University Libraries