It was bound to happen. The combination of the two hundredth anniversary of Mo zart’s death and the réclame that greeted the avant-garde stage director Peter Sellars’s productions of the master’s operas a few years ago at the Pepsico Summerfare Festival must have supplied the Public Broadcasting Service with a marriage made in media heaven. The result was the broadcasting of three of the greatest Mozart operas on PBS this past winter in Sellars’s outré (to say the least) versions.

At this point there is little to be said about the current Mozart celebrations. Lincoln Center is doing all—every note—of Mo zart’s music; the Philips record label is bring ing out a similarly complete edition on com pact disc. As might be imagined, the musicological community has fully mobilized itself, and a spate of Mozart books, describ ing in great detail every facet of the com poser’s life and works, is flooding the book stores. Just one example of the academic in terest in Mozart is provided by a several-day conference this past February at Hofstra University called “200 Years of Research and Analysis”; the conference brought together scholars from Europe and America to discuss such topics as “Performance Implications of the Topical and Rhetorical Devices in Three Mozart Masses” and “‘Mozart-Rezeption im 20 Jahrhundert’: Methods and Results of Research at the University of Salzburg.”

It cannot be doubted that the present Mozart hoopla is only a continuation of the love affair we have been having