ALBI ROSENTHAL

Mozart's predilection for playing with words, for anagrams and games of
various kinds, is well known and well documented. The numerous instances
familiar from many of his letters consisting of anagrams, reshuffling letters
within a word or words within a phrase, exchanging the first and last words,
or two inner ones, usually symmetrically, have their counterpart even in
some passages of Mozart's music, e.g. in the last movement of the String
Quartet in F, K. 590, where the notes of the Rondo theme, condensed into
a pattern of three tones repeated over and over again, become anagrams of
each other ( Ex. 11.1 ).

Mozart's musical handwriting has been studied exhaustively by many schol-
ars, such as Ludwig Schiedermair, Georg Schünemann, Alfred Einstein, and
several others, above all by Wolfgang Plath in his magisterial analysis of the
development of Mozart's script between 1770 and 1780.¹

It was, however, Emanuel Winternitz who examined Mozart's handwrit-
ing specifically under the aspect of 'homo ludens', in his comprehensive
survey 'Gnagflow Trazom: An Essay on Mozart's Script, Pastimes, and Non-
sense Letters'.² He drew attention particularly to Mozart's 'space aura'--his

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