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A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing ("Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule")

Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule is a textbook for instruction in the violin. This work made a reputation in Europe for Leopold, and his name begins to appear around this time in music dictionaries and other works of musical pedagogy. The work was influential in its day, and continues to serve as a scholarly source concerning 18th century performance practice. Leopold wrote his textbook during the year 1755, when he was 36 years old, and it was published in 1756. Until that date no guide exists as yet to violin playing. Leopold had these in mind goes without saying, when at the end of 1753 beginning of 1754 he sat down to the composition of his method and he owes it to this example that his work also is far more than mere instruction in technique. He considered that this treatise was a work well done and he took on the work of publication himself. In the spring of 1755 he entered into negotiations for its publication with Johann Jacob Lotter8 (a printer in Leopold's home town of Augsburg), as we can read in a letter 21st July: “…You must always say that you did not know how costly it would be, but that it might possibly cost as much as 300 Gulden…” Leopold shipped copies of his book far and wide and received his share of the profits when they were sold. On the 28th of August 1755 he was still working on the elaboration of the

book as a letter dated on this very date shows: “. . . In consequence of your writing that you do not know what length the manuscript will be, owing to the copious music-notation, I have, in the meantime, ended with the eleventh chapter…” He was writing during the last semester of 1755 and finished during the initial months of 1755 as a letter written in February 1756 shows (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on 27 January 1756). In a letter written on17th February 1756 he was really impatient because Lotter was being very slow with the printing8:”. . . Well, to come to my Violinschule I am very much surprised that you wish to say something concerning the engraving and ask for more manuscript, as you are only now beginning to set up the fourth chapter. If you prove to me by your diligence that the delays are my fault, and if you finish what you have in hand within the promised time, I will take the blame on myself. Do you remember what you said to me? That I was to be easy in my mind and believe in your word. I did so. But the 28th of this month is the birthday of His Grace [the Archbishop Sigismund v. Schrattenbach]. Could there have been a better opportunity to present my work?...” At last, presumably in the late summer, the work appeared; at any rate, Leopold's Preface is dated the 26th of July 1756. During the beginning of this year Leopold Mozart made great efforts in its final elaboration. Leopold was anxious to finish his work as a letter sent on 12 February 1756 to his editor8 shows and in which a certain irritability about the birth of his latest son Mozart can be seen and why he could not carry out all his activities correctly: “…I can assure you, I have so much to do that I sometimes do not know where my head it. Not, to be sure, because of composition, but because of the many pupils and the operas at Court. And you know as well as I do that, when the wife is in childbed, there is always somebody turning up to rob you of time. Things like that cost money and time” All these facts mark the elaboration times of this book and reveal that in this period he was working both intensely and meticulously on the book. Translation this to the tempos of Wolfgang’s life he was submitted to a peculiar “atmospheric contamination” during the final months of prenatal development and the first neonatal weeks. This was caused by the sounds produced by all the musical activity carried out daily by his father: both teaching and professional with great anxiety to finish his work shown in his letters and which suggested his intense musical work. Christian Daniel Schubart, Swabian poet, music author, and songcomposer, wrote of Leopold in his Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1806) 9 about the good election of the exercises showed in the treatise: “By his Violinschule written in very good German and with deep insight, he has earned great merit. The examples are excellently chosen and his "fingering" is by no means pedantic.” Leopold created with real meticulousness, reflexion and insistence suitable academic sounds for a correct learning of the violin and with a clear intention as will be described later on. F Ghering10 wrote about Versuch einer grunlichen Violinschule: “For a long time this was the only instruction book for the violin which went through numerous editions, and was translated into several languages. To thoroughly appreciate the elder Mozart we must read this book. It displays the greatest thoroughness and variety of ideas, and it abounds in treasures of pedagogic lore. All through he insists on the necessity of the student's becoming thoroughly acquainted with every detail of his art. He must gain an insight into its principles, not trust to chance and accidental taste, but to the laws of nature and art. However highly gifted a man may be by nature, he must study and work hard. Extraordinary natural gifts, no doubt, frequently compensate for the absence of study, but such cases do not affect the universal rule, and by no means lessen the justice of the demands which one makes on every violinist. It was in such principles that he afterwards trained his son…. to watch care fully over his children's education, and when his son soon afterwards came out as a composer, lie very wisely avoided any rivalry with him.”(Dr F Gehring, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1792). Ruth Halliwell11 reviews the core of the work thus: "At the level of practical comments on improving aspects of violin technique, Leopold showed himself to be full of common sense, and to be capable of expressing his explanations in robust and clear language… Leopold knew

exactly what he wanted to do, that he had strong opinions on how pupils should be taught to play the violin, that he had thought out how to present his material in the clearest possible way, that he wanted even impoverished pupils to be able to afford his book, and that he was prepared to put in all the necessary work to get the details just right… a man very sure of his own abilities...” In conclusion, all the considerations regarding this book coincide with the fact that it was a high qualities treatise, well meditated, and presenting well directed and brilliant ideas for playing the violin. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this work is the footnote written by the man who translated the work into English. The translator to English wrote about a topic in which Leopold insisted in this treatise12: “There is no English noun of to-day which quite conveys the meaning of 'Affect' as employed by eighteenth-century German writers on music. The corresponding English term of the period was 'the passions'; but this again does not quite mean to the present day reader what it did to the English poets and aestheticians of that epoch. The notion underlying the doctrine of the 'Affecte' was that each piece of music expressed, and could only express, one 'passion', one 'movement of the soul* tenderness, grief, rage, despair, contentment, &c. and Leopold Mozart is at pains to insist that before a player can perform a piece of music in accordance with the composer's intention he must understand the 'Affect' from which the music originated. So rooted in the eighteenth-century mind was this doctrine that a work could delineate only one 'passion' that some aestheticians even contended that the new sonata, with its attempt to run in harness together two 'passions’, represented by two utterly contrasted subjects, was an impracticable form.” The book is an intense effort from Leopold in teaching of the “affect”. This is the essence of the manuscript and the key to his success. He constructed his excellent Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule choosing the scores in an intentional way to understand and transmit a correct “Affect”. Leopold wrote about the fact that mere technical instruction would not produce fine violinists. For instance, concerning a particular aspect of bowing, Leopold insisted in the Affect (approximately, emotion) intended by the composer, so that the most appropriate bowing could be chosen. Leopold envisaged that the performer should be capable of studying a piece for clues about the intended Affect... The player must prepare the violin and all the interpretation to get the adequate Affect. Leopold was an expert a laborious and persevering violin teacher and as such each paragraph in the treatise had its own intention in order to reach this objective.

Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule; this is he world of sounds that invaded the Mozart’s house. His son Wolfgang was one of the first to know the work in a phase of extreme plasticity in his nervous system. This treatise could hold the key to where the basis of one the first fetal lessons in coded language is described- Wolfgang A. Would have been the first truly prenatally educated pupil allowed to assimilate knowledge before birth and the development of one of the most important brains in the history of mankind. This code for fetal learning is to be found in these scores and his way of interpreting them in a correct 'Affect'. The result of using this method could have achieved and exciting stimulus during fetal life which would open doors to antenatal education. The argument laid forward in the article has a certain relationship with the Mozart effect: listening to Mozart's music may induce a short-term improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as “spatial-temporal reasoning” (ability to mentally manipulate objects in three-dimensional space). This effect of the music of Mozart was described by French

researcher, Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis in his book Pourquoi Mozart (1991)13. Nicknamed "Dr. Mozart" by his patients, he was the first to mention "the Mozart effect." According to Tomatis, the ear's primary function is to help the brain of the unborn child grow. Our nervous system can be "charged" or "discharged" by the sounds around us. The positive effects of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on spatial reasoning ability have become a popular topic. Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993)14 investigated the effect of listening to music by Mozart on spatial reasoning in a group of 36 college undergraduates. The authors found that the mean standard age scores converted into IQ scores were 8 to 9 points higher after listening to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata and lasted for 10-15 minutes. This study was published in Nature and had a great diffusion. After these results Don Campbell published a book (Campbell, Don (1997) entitled The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit15 where he claims benefits far beyond improving spatio-temporal reasoning or raising intelligence, defining the mark as "an inclusive term signifying the transformational powers of music in health, education, and well-being." He decided to make a trade mark: “Mozart Effect” ®. (United States Patent and Trademark Office Trademark Application and Registration Retrieval (TARR). "Latest Status Info (75094728)". Filed 1996-0426.)Retrieved 2009-04-28. "Latest Status Info (75094727)". Filed 1996-04-26. Retrieved 200904-28.) Here it was the begging for the diffusion of the Mozart effect. From this moment on some studies have suggested that listening to Mozart has a positive effect on spatial IQ17, 18,19. Others authors state that this effect has not been proved. However, what different researchers suggest is that while we listen to Mozart music our intellectual capacity improves 20,21,22,23. This association seems interesting and should be and should be analyzed24. In summary, Leopold Mozart was appointed to a position (fourth violinist) in the musical establishment of Count Leopold Anton von Firmian, the ruling Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. His duties included composition and the teaching of violin (later, piano) to the choirboys of the Salzburg cathedral. He wrote while the fetus of his son Wolfgang was growing his excellent Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule where the laws for antenatal learning with the essence of the“Affect” as a basic principle for fetal knowledge could have been codified. The last semester of 1755 we assisted the true Mozart effect from sounds that Leopold wrote in the Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule and played during the fetal development. Leopold provided intelligence and Wolfgang genius. In summary, we were spectators of a true effect of the sounds over the fetal development: the miracle was called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a Leopold Mozart’s effect on Mozart, that is, a Mozart effect on Mozart. REFERENCES. 1. The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. Edited by Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe. Cambridge University Press. The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York. Cambridge University Press 2006 2. Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, article "Mozart". Cliff Eisen. Copyright 2007 by Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1985. 3. Brion M. “Mozart”. Editorial Juventud, Barcelona, 1990. 4. Barrington. “Account of a Very Remarkable Musician”. "Philosophical Transactions," vol. 60, 1770, pp. 54–64. 5. Solomon, Maynard. Mozart: A life. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996. 6. Einstein, Alfred. Mozart, His Character, His Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1945, xi-xxxi. 7. Mozart L. A treatise on the fundamental principles of violin playing. Early Musci Series 6. Oxford University Press. Oxford, 1985. 8. Alfred Einstein. Preface. Mozart L. A treatise on the fundamental principles of violin playing. Early Musci Series 6. Oxford University Press. Oxford, 1985. 9. Christian Daniel Schubart Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1806). Wien. Bey J. V. Degen. Buchdrucker und Buchhändler. 10. Gehring F. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Foreword by Francesco Berger. London Sampson Low, Marstpn & Co, LTD. Printed in Great Britain by Purnell and Sons Paulton, Somerset, England. MDCCXCIV. 11. Halliwell, Ruth (1998) The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context, Oxford University Press. 12. Knocker E, Translator of A treatise on the fundamental

principles of violin playing. Leopold Mozart. Early Musci Series 6. Oxford University Press. Oxford, 1985, xxxii-xxxv. 13. Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis. Pourquoi Mozart (1991). Diffusion, Hachette. 14. Rauscher, F.H., Shaw, G.L. and Ky, K.N., Music and spatial task performance, Nature, 365 (1993) 611. 15. Campbell, Don (1997) entitled The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit. Harper Collins Publishers. New York, 2001. 16. Rauscher FH, Shaw GL, Ky KN. Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: towards a neurophysiological basis- Neuroscience Letters 185 (1995) 44--47 17. Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, K. N. (1995). Listen- ing to Mozart Enhances Spatial-Temporal Reasoning: Towards a Neurophysical Basis. Neuroscience Letters, 185, 44-47. 18. Rideout, B. E., Dougherty, S., & Wernert, L. (1998). Effect of Music on Spatial Performance: A Test of Generality. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 86(2), 512-514. 19. Rideout, B. E., & Taylor, J. (1997). Enhanced Spatial Per- formance Following 10 Minutes Exposure to Music: A Replication. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 85, 112-114. 20. Wilson TM; Brown TL, Reexamination of the effect of Mozart's music on spatial-task performance The Journal of Psychology,1997; 131: 365-370. 21. Thompson WF, Schellenberg EG, Husain G. Arousal, mood, and the Mozart effect. Psychol Sci. 2001 May;12(3):248-51. 22. Steele KM, Bass KE, Crookl MD. The mistery of the Mozart effect: Failure to replicate. Psychological Science 1999, 10: 366369. 23. Schellenberg, EG. Music and Cognitive Abilities. Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2005, 14, 317320. 24. Pietschnig J, Voracek M, Formann AK. Mozart effect-Shmozart effect: A meta-analysis. Intelligence, 2010; 38 (3): 314 DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2010.03.001