Their aunt soon introduced them [the village
girls Hanchen and Fiekchen] to society. On their
street lived two sisters, adorned with every
charm of youth, soft as the first morning light in
the spring sky, beautiful as the day, winsome,
demure, upright, united more by sympathy than
by birth, one heart and one soul, as one says.
The village girls soon became acquainted,
And tasted there the tea and biscuits,
But then began to provoke one another,
As each constantly contradicted the other;
What for Hanchen was night, was day for Fiekchen,
The aunt finally had to forbid the dispute
With stern severity.
The shrewd hostess contrived a plan to cover
over this dissonance: she sat gracefully down at the
keyboard, her younger sister followed her, and
both enchanted the ear with Mozart’s mellifluous
chords in a most charming sonata for four hands.
Spirit and heart were united in sweet harmony,
with each swan-white hand, now in rapid alternating
passages, now in melodious unity, translating
the artist’s notes from the page.
Commentary
The Weimar professor Johann Karl August Musäus (1735–1787) was an uncle of the playwright Kotzebue, whose play Menschenhaß und Reue also contains a reference to Mozart. The posthumous Moralische Kinderklapper für Kinder und Nichtkinder is freely adapted from Les hochets moraux, a volume of children’s stories in verse by “M. Monget.” However, there appears to be no direct analog to the story “Harmonie” in Monget’s original.
“Harmonie” concerns an aunt who takes her two nieces, Hanchen and Fiekchen (diminutives of Anna and Sophia), under her protection in order to reform the ill manners of their small-town upbringing. They are all invited to tea at the house of two young, beautiful, winsome, demure, and upright sisters, where however Hanchen and Fiekchen begin to argue. To cover up the dispute, the "good" sisters play a Mozart four-hand sonata. Chastened by this display of “harmony,” Hanchen and Fiekchen resolve to improve their own behavior. If Musäus had a specific Mozart keyboard sonata for four hands in mind, it could have been any of K. 358, 381, 497 or 521, all of which were in print by the time of the writer’s death.
The 1788 edition of the story contains no illustrations, but a later edition from 1794 shows the two "good" sisters at a square piano. Notably, the sister playing the lower part is standing.
Notes
A color scan of the 1788 edition of Kinderklapper is available online from Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB). A facsimile of the 1794 edition was published in 1968 by Edition Leipzig.
The images of pp. 69–70 from the 1788 edition of Moralische Kinderklapper are from the exemplar in the collection of Christopher J. Salmon, to whom we are very grateful.
Bibliography
“M. Monget”. 1781–1784. Les Hochets moraux. 2 vols. Paris: Lambert et Baudouin. [vol. 1; vol. 2]
Credit: DB & DE
Author:
David Black
Search Term: mozart
Source Library:
Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent, BIB.BL.002568
Categories:
Reception,
Mozart in Literature
First Published: Thu, 12 Jun 2014
Updated: Sun, 17 Dec 2017
Print Citation:
Black, David. 2014. “A four-hand piano sonata by Mozart in a story by Musäus
(1788).” In: Mozart: New Documents, edited by Dexter Edge and David Black. First published 12 June 2014; updated 17 December 2017. https://www.mozartdocuments.org/documents/1788-musaus/
Web Citation:
Black, David. 2014. “A four-hand piano sonata by Mozart in a story by Musäus
(1788).” In: Mozart: New Documents, edited by Dexter Edge and David Black. First published 12 June 2014; updated 17 December 2017. [direct link]
