Acknowledgments

To begin, I would like to thank my contributing authors for the splendid essays found within this volume and for many stimulating exchanges about Mozart and other topics. It has been a privilege to collaborate with such an extraordinary group of scholars. I would also like to thank many friends and colleagues for providing wise counsel and generous support at various stages: among them Alessandra Campana, Cathy Coppola, Paul Corneilson, Dan DiCenso, Mark Ferraguto, Simon Keefe, Daniel Melamed, Adeline Mueller, John Platoff, Karl-Heinz Schoeps, and Neal Zaslaw. At the College of the Holy Cross, I have received invaluable assistance from several colleagues. Robert Simon, our Fenwick Music Librarian, has been an extraordinary resource and help, especially with iconography, and deserves special thanks. Jared Rex (now at the Boston Public Library), Susan Skoog, and Patricia Chuplis were enormously helpful. I also feel a special debt of gratitude to all of the students in my seminars and courses over the years who asked challenging questions about Mozart and his world, and about this opera in particular.

I am grateful to several institutions for providing the images that appear in this volume and in the companion Resources Tab: the Albertina, the KHM-Museumverband, Theatermuseum Vienna, the Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv/St. Pölten, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, and the Wien Museum.

A special word of thanks goes to Kate Brett, my editor at Cambridge University Press, for making this volume possible and for providing excellent advice and assistance along the way. I am also grateful to everyone at the Press who assisted with production, especially the volume’s copy-editor Virginia Hamilton.

I owe a debt of gratitude beyond what words can express to my family: to my parents, Alice and Leon Waldoff, who have watched this volume come together with interest and have assisted in a variety of ways; and to my wonderful husband, Nathaniel Brese, who has watched this opera with me countless times, has often served as a sounding board, and has provided love and support through all of life’s trials in recent years.

With admiration and gratitude, I dedicate this book to James Webster and Neal Zaslaw, who encouraged and shaped my first attempts to write about this opera when I was a student at Cornell. Thank you for a lifetime of support and friendship.