This German disc of music by three generations of Mozarts -- Leopold,
Wolfgang Amadeus, and Franz Xaver, billed for a time as Wolfgang Amadeus Jr. -- comes with no printed texts at all. Baritone
Konrad Jarnot articulates the words well, but if you don't understand German easily, this disc will be of little use to you. Even if you do, it has its problems.
Jarnot has a pleasing, rich tone that works nicely in the works that are closest to the familiar Romantic German art-song vocabulary -- the works of Franz Xaver, and the most forward-looking among the little-known songs of
Wolfgang Amadeus, such as the
Goethe setting Das Veilchen. He doesn't adjust his tone much to take account of the domestic roots of the earlier German lied, however; the opening songs by Leopold Mozart, all very short, and the earlier songs of
Wolfgang Amadeus come off as too portentous. The inclusion at the end of a song by Julie von Baroni-Cavalcabò, one of Franz Xaver Mozart's students, offers a nice extension of the parade of generations even if its treatment in the notes is rather patronizing -- the performers, wrote annotator Richard Eckstein, "wanted to add a touch of feminine magic." The notes have other defects; since the stated goal of the Augsburg Mozart Festival with which this disc is associated is to "[reintroduce] rare and forgotten music literature of
Mozart's time," one might think that basic information, such as text authorship and dates of composition, would be consistently provided. They are not. One learns that six of the Franz Xaver Mozart songs were published in 1810, but the other three are left to the listener's imagination (in one, he seems to use a translated text by Lord Byron in order to look back with regret on his hothouse career). The problems with this disc do not lie with its program concept, or even really with its performers, but with its overall execution.