School of Creative Arts

Achievements and Distinctions

Ian Woodfield (b.1951) read Music at Nottingham University and at King's College, London. He was appointed at Queen's in 1978 and became Senior Lecturer in 1989, Reader in 1994, and Professor of Historical Musicology in 1999. His main areas of research are now in the 18th-century, in particular the study of Mozart autographs and early manuscript copies.


Research Interests

The viol; music in the age of exploration; the social history of music in late eighteenth-century England and the role of women; Italian opera in late eighteenth-century London; Anglo-Indian music; the sources of Mozart’s operas, autographs and early manuscript copies.


Current Work

His current project is on the early sources of Mozart's Don Giovanni:

Many uncertainties remain about what exactly was performed when Don Giovanni was given its Viennese première in 1788, one year after the Prague first performance. As was his usual practice, Mozart revised the work substantially for the new production to take account of the requirements of the new singers, and in doing so he made significant changes to the plot. Despite the excellent work done by Alan Tyson and the editors of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe, supplemented recently by Dexter Edge's monumental thesis on Viennese copyists in which he announced the discovery of some of the orchestral parts of the original Vienna performances, it remains far from clear what was actually performed on the night of 7 May 1788, because there are numerous and significant discrepancies between the published libretto and the scores and parts. Based on the results of my on-going project on the early sources of Così fan tutte, I believe there is an excellent chance that a highly detailed text-critical study of all the early manuscript scores of Don Giovanni could produce exciting and original results, in particular clarifying further the relationship between the Prague and Vienna versions of this opera.

This project begins with a detailed study of the Vienna Court Theatre archive of Don Giovanni, a large body of scores and parts all catalogued under the single shelf mark O.A.361. The next stage will involve comparing this score first with early copies of the original Prague version, now located in Prague, Nelahozeves and Karlsruhe, and then with other early copies made from the Vienna score. A significant element of this investigation will be a survey of page- and line-breaks, as this feature provides a very sophisticated tool for analysing the relationships between scores. (Viennese copyists routinely replicated what they saw, and where there are departures from this habit, it can be very revealing.) But the study will also include detailed palaeographical examinations of these scores (each of which is usually at least 1,000 pages long), for the purposes of identifying errors and variants of all kinds, and thus the relationships between the different sources. Numerous physical features have the potential to aid this quest, including: patterns of ink usage; crossings out; erasures (passages scraped out with a knife but which may still leave visible traces); watermarks; score collation; variants in musical notational practices; and scribal hands. All this detailed information will be used to develop a picture of patterns of transmission.

In particular it should be possible:

(a) to identify the precise relationship between the Prague and Vienna versions (i.e. whether the Vienna score was re-copied from the autograph or from a Prague score);

(b) to establish what can be learnt about the earliest state of the Vienna original from later copies;

(c) and to identify a chronology of changes made to the opera in both its Prague and Vienna versions.

This in turn should provide enough material to re-evaluate the late eighteenth-century reception history of this seminal work.

A second Don Giovanni related project is an extended article analysing the activities of the Bondini-Guardasoni Italian opera troupe, in the light of evidence found in theatre posters in the Leipzig Stadtgeschichtliches Museum and in the Indice de’teatrali spettacoli.

Selected Publications

• The Early History of the Viol (Cambridge University Press, 1984; reprinted 1986; paperback edition, 1988; reissued, 2006); Italian edition ed. & trans. R. Meucci, with revised preface: La Viola da Gamba dalle origini al Rinascimento, xx + 292 (Edizioni di Torino, Torino, 1999)
• English Musicians in the Age of Exploration (Pendragon Press, New York, 1995), xviii + 310
• Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late 18th-Century Anglo-Indian Society (Oxford University Press, 2000), xx + 274
• Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick, and the Business of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2001; paperback reissue, 2006), xiv + 330
• Salomon and the Burneys: Private Patronage and a Public Career (Royal Musical Association Monographs, No.12, 2003), vi + 83
• Mozart’s Così fan tutte: A Compositional History (Boydell, 2008)

Research Grants

Arts and Humanities Research Board (2000-2001): £3020: A study of the autograph score of Mozart’s Così fan tutte

British Academy (2001-2002): £1700: A study of the sources of Mozart's Così fan tutte

Arts and Humanities Research Board (2003-2004): £3000: A study of the sources of Mozart’s Così fan tutte

British Academy (2007-2008): £5080: A study of the early manuscript copies of Mozart's Don Giovanni

Arts and Humanities Research Council (2007) £35,564: Study Leave

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