ABSTRACT
Until the second half of the nineteenth century composers tended to work within a lingua franca, which did not prevent their music from having a discernible individuality. Their personalities are evident both in matters of style and in peculiarities of notation and terminology. Leopold Mozart's music incarnates a cosmopolitan vernacular depicting a wide range of dramatic and emotional situations, which are intimately bound up with the social conventions of his day. Musicians who immerse themselves in the stimulating study of Mozart's expressive vocabulary will become aware of his sophisticated rendering of character shifts and will exploit these viscerally in performances of dazzling theatricality in the best sense. Essential to idiomatic performance of eighteenth-century music is the addition of decoration to the notated text. This was normally improvised anew at each performance by professional musicians. Mozart was acquainted with and wrote for harpsichord, clavichord, organ, clock organ and piano.
