best mozart biography book

20 Best Mozart Book Reviews 2022 (Best Books to Learn Mozart)

Best Mozart Book

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Mozart book is highly recommended for music lovers, musicians, and students who want to know more about the life and works of the most influential and famous composers of all time. Apart from that, this book can also serve as a guide book for Piano players looking to improve their skills .

Read Also:  Mozart Biography ,  Mozart’s Symphonies ,  Mozart Facts ,  The Best of Mozart ,  Mozart’s Starling ,  Mozart as a child , Mozart Famous Piano Pieces

What are the Best Mozart Books to Buy?

2) Lyanda Lynn Haupt: Mozart’s Starling

• Remarkable Bond Between Mozart & His Starling
• Biography & Memoir
• Understanding on the Connection Between Art & Life

1) Who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

• Biography Charts
• Black & White Illustrations
• Timeline & Bibliography
• Easy to Understand
• Price-Friendly

3) John Suchet: Mozart

• Detailed & Informative
• Helpful Illustrations & Paintings
• Better Understanding the Famous Composer

Interested to Learn Mozart Online? Check These Websites!

Mozart books come in different sizes. Some Mozart books are voluminous, giving you in-depth knowledge on everything you need to know about the biography of composers. There are Mozart books with fascinating illustrations designed for children. We also more advanced ones for experienced players and music lovers.

The advantage of Mozart's book cannot be overestimated. Apart from enriching the knowledge of music enthusiasts and players about the life and times of famous composers, it is also designed to improve the playing skills of pianists. Not only that, but you can also develop your child’s interest in music by getting him or her a Mozart book. The books are not only enlightening, but it is also fascinating. Some books adopt a story-telling approach to capture the attention of the young ones.

About Mozart

Mozart was a composer known for his exploits in music. He was one of the most influential and prolific composers during classical times. The works of Mozart are still being appreciated; therefore, musicians have dedicated their time studying the works and life of this famous composer. Today, the work of Mozart is included in many music curriculums.

If you are keen on learning about the Child prodigy that composes his first symphony at the age of eight, then you need to get a Mozart book. The books are designed in such a way that it has a perfect balance between musical teachings and biographies. Thus, it can serve as a musical reference long after you have read the book.

For those looking to buy the right Mozart book, we have come up with 20 best Mozart books of all time. These books were chosen based on factors like the author's experience, the contents, the accuracy of the information given, among others.

Related:  Unfinished Mozart Opera ,  What Instruments Did Mozart Play? (Answered)  

20 Best Mozart Book Reviews

1. Who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

Nancy Harrison did the cover illustration of the book; Carrie Robbins illustrated the book. Yona Zeldis McDonough wrote this unique book. She has won several awards as an author, and she is also a doll lover and collector. She has published different books for adults and children. This Mozart book is perfect for readers of 8 years and above. Also, Penguin Workshop published the book on April 28, 2003. The dimension of the book measures 5.2 x 0.2 x 7.6 inches.

If you are on the lookout for a Mozart book that is ideal for homeschooling, then you should not search any further, this excellent book by Yona Zeldies is all you need. The book comes with the right text for children in 3rd to 6th grade. Apart from that, it comes with illustrations to aid understanding. Some of the remarkable features of this book are that it is detailed, easy to understand, and enjoyable. If you need a classic Mozart book for your kid, then you consider Who Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was.

2. Lyanda Lynn Haupt: Mozart’s Starling

Mozart's Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt is described as a book that is hard to put down. This means that it is a captivating and informative book. It is a fantastic blend of biography, science, as well as a memoir that shed light on many unknown stories of the composers and his love bird. The book is highly readable for all categories of readers whether or not you are a music professional. The book was published on April 4, 2017, by Little, Brown Spark.

This unique book is written for readers that are sensitive and have a sense of appreciation for nature and art. It is a highly recommended book for anyone who desires a better understanding of the connection between art and life. Apart from that, the book contains facts about birds and communication between other species.

3. John Suchet: Mozart

Do you seek a Mozart book that is rich in warmth and wit? If yes, then you should take advantage of this great Mozart book by John Suchet. It is a perfect way to understand the famous composers. In addition to that, the book is impressive, detailed, and informative. The author was one of the most respected TV journalists in England before he ventured into classical music. He received several awards as a reporter and a musician. Pegasus books published this excellent work of John Suchet on August 8, 2017.

This book has been described as one of the best biographies for music enthusiasts that do not need too many technical details. The book is exciting and highly recommended for those who desire to know the biography of Mozart. The book comes with helpful illustrations and paintings. In this book, the author corrected a lot of myths about Mozart. If you need a Mozart book that is well structured and written by an experienced author, then you should not overlook this unique Mozart book.

4. Paul Johnson: Mozart - A Life

This is an excellent Mozart book by Paul Johnson. He has authored numerous bestselling books. Examples of such books are A Man for Our Times, Portrait of a Genius, A Penguin Life, and Churchill, among others. This unique Mozart book is not an exception. It is a concise, intelligent book that will appeal to all serious-minded music enthusiasts. Apart from that, the book is designed for all readers whether or not you are a music expert. Penguin Books published the book on November 25, 2014. Furthermore, it is written in English.

The dimension of this Mozart book measures 0.6 x 5.4 x 8.3 inches. The length of the book is about 176 pages. The text is explanatory and easy to read. The author packs a great deal of useful information in this book. He employs a unique and comprehensive approach in dealing with the explanation of Mozart's work. If you are interested in understanding the old Mozart's hand, then you pick up this excellent book.

5. David Dutkanicz: A First Book of Mozart

Are you a beginner piano player looking for an engaging Mozart book? If that is the case, then you need to give this book a try. David Dutkanicz authors it. He was a former Dover editor, and he holds a music degree from Columbia University and New York University. The book is ideal for children of ages four years upwards. It was published on December 28, 2005, by Dover Publications. The dimension of the Mozart book measures 8 x 0.2 x 10.8 inches. And it contains 48 pages.

The piano book features easy lessons featuring both bass and treble notes. One of the advantages of this book is that it provided a website address where you can listen to the tunes being played. The First book of Mozart is perfect for beginner player that has not yet mastered the correct timing of speed and tempo.

6. Mozart 19 Sonatas – Complete: Piano Solo

The text of this Mozart book is written in both Spanish and English. And, the book was edited and revised by Richard Epstein. Philip Hale did the composer biographical sketch. The book's dimension measures 9 x 0.8 x 12 inches. G. Schirmer Incorporation published the book on November 1, 1986.

Furthermore, it consists of 322 high-quality pages that are excellently bound. If you desire to re-acquaint yourself with Mozart playing style, then you should give this book a try. You will be pleased to know that this unique book comes at an affordable price. Also, the quality of the book is great, and its texts are clear. The Mozart 19 Sonatas is a highly motivating and inspiring book for music lovers.

7. Mozart: A Life by Maynard Solomon

If you desire to know more about Mozart's two hundred birthday, you should go for this excellent book by Maynard Solomon. It presents the biography of the musician in a satisfying and moving manner. The dimension of this Mozart book measures 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches, while it contains about 640 pages. This unique Mozart book was published on December 27, 2005, by Harper Perennials. The book gives an excellent picture of the life of Mozart. It explains the musician's relationship with his father as well as other essential aspects of his life.

If you are interested in knowing more details about composers, then you need to get this unique book. It is also worth mentioning that the book is written in an easy-to-understand and friendly version for all music lovers. If you are keen on learning about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, you will not be disappointed when you read this excellent book by Maynard Solomon.

8. Mozart: Piano Sonatas Vol. 1

If you are looking for an excellent Mozart book that is easy to read, then you should consider the volume one of the Mozart Piano Sonatas. Some of the advantages of this unique book are that it is highly organized and comes in clear printing. These are some of the factors the enhances the readability of this Mozart book. Furthermore, the book is made with high-quality material that will enable it to withstand years of intensive usage.

The book was published on November 1, 2006, by Henle publisher. Its dimension measure 12 x 9.2 x 0.5 inches. The Mozart Piano Sonatas volume one contains about 158 pages, and it is written in English. If you need a Mozart book with clear and correct fingering, top-quality pages, and clear printing, do not hesitate to go for this excellent Mozart book.

9. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography

This is an outstanding Mozart book authored by Lydia G. Cochrane. The book was published on May 1, 2008, by the University of Chicago Press. The book gives an explanatory account of the remarkable life as well as times of Mozart. The dimension of the book measures 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches. The book is written in English, and it comprises 300 pages. This is the right Mozart book for you if you want to have a full understanding of the life and times of Mozart.

Are you looking for a book that has the right balance when it comes to the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? If that is the case, then you should go for this excellent book. The book is both informative and enjoyable. Some of the features of this book are perfect layout, detailed chapters, incredible stories, among others.

10. Wolfgang A. Mozart: Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers

This Mozart book was written by someone who has authored several non-fiction books for children. The book gives the biography of a child prodigy who died at the age of thirty-five. Before his death, he had written over 800 pieces of music. The book is designed for children from the ages of 6 above. The book comprises 32 pages, and it was published on October 1, 1995, by Children Press.

The dimension of this book measures 7.8 x 0.2 x 9.2 inches. It features cartoons, which makes the book fun-filled and exciting to read. If you need educational material to boost the musical knowledge of your kids, you should take advantage of this unique book by Mike Venezia. Are you a teacher looking for a perfect way to introduce your 3 rd graders to famous artists and composers? You will find the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by Mike Venezia extremely helpful in this regard.

11. W.A Mozart

Seasoned professionals authored this book. The likes of Prof Herman Abert, Stewart Spencer, and Cliff Eisen. Professor Herman Abert was a renowned musicologist in the early 20th century, while Steward Spencer is a translator, author, and musical consultant. Cliff Eisen is one of the editors of The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. The book was published on November 30, 200,7, by Yale University Press. And, its dimension measures 7.8 x 3.2 x 10.2 inches.

The book is enlightening and enriching. It contains some of the essential biographies musicians written to broaden the horizon of all music lovers. The book is voluminous as it contains about 1515 pages. It is often regarded as a bible that all music scholars and enthusiasts can use for reference. The advantage of this book is that it is accurate and detailed. If you need a superb book that provides a thorough investigation of the life of W.A Mozart, then you should take advantage of this voluminous book.

12. Mozart: From Easy to Intermediate Piano Masterpieces

Do you have a passion for Mozart? Then you should consider this book. It is designed for everyone with a genuine interest in Mozart. The book features clear fingering designed to serve as a go-to resource for any keyboard player or pianist. On January 1, 2013, the book was published by Flame Tree Publishing. Furthermore, the dimension of the book measures 8.5 x 0.6 x 11 inches. The book contains 160 pages.

The author of this Mozart book is Alan Brown. He works presently as a freelance musician. He is a consultant and has published several compositions. The advantage of this book is that it is carefully designed to suit all levels of players. Mozart: From Easy to Intermediate Piano Masterpieces is a challenging, rewarding, and exciting book for all serious-minded pianists.

13. Mozart: Later Symphonies (Nos. 35 -41)

This excellent book was published on June 1, 1974, by Dover Publication. The dimension of the book measures 9.3 x 0.6 x 12.1 inches. The book features the full orchestra scores of Mozart Symphonies 35 to 41. It is worth mentioning that this volume was reprinted straight from the Breitkopt and Hartel Complete edition. Some of the things you will find in this Mozart book are Symphony No 35 in D Major k.385, Symphony No 36 in C Major, K 425, and so on.

Furthermore, the book contains 288 pages, and it is written in English. The Mozart scores are straightforward, so they are easy to read. This Mozart book is perfect for college-level works. Some of its features are clear text, straightforward approach, enough room for making notes, among others. If you need a Mozart book that comes with easy-to-read scores, then you should give the Later Symphonies (Nos 35 to 41) in Full Score a try.

14. Complete Sonatas and Fantasies for Solo Piano

Are you looking for a Mozart book with complete, authentic scores? If yes, then you should try the Complete Sonatas and Fantasies for Solo Piano. This book is highly recommended for all piano players. The book was published by Dover publication on September 3, 1996. Also, the dimension of the Mozart book measures 9.2 x 0.8 x 12.2 inches. It has about 272 pages. This unique Mozart book is ideal for all categories of pianists as it exposes them to everything they need to know about the playing techniques of the musical instrument.

This great edition features four fantasies and nineteen sonatas. The book is unique because it includes works that have been mistakenly omitted in other Mozart editions. This is one of the most thorough versions, and it comes at a pocket-friendly price.

15. Mozart: Favorite Piano Works

If you need a Mozart book that will help your daughter in her piano lesson, then you should go for this unique book. Apart from the fact that it is easy to follow, it features clear texts and comes at a reasonable price. G.Schirmer, Incorporation published this excellent book on February 1, 2014. The dimension of the book measures 9 x 0.5 x 12 inches. It features 12 famous pieces, which include the Rondos in D major, Sonatas that is most played, Sonatina in C Major, as well as 12 different versions of Ah, Vous dirai-je, Maman.

Furthermore, the Mozart book is not only ideal for learners; intermediate players who want to expand their musical knowledge can also take advantage of the book. The book contains about 168 pages. Other well-known pieces contained in the book are Piano sonata in C Major, Fantasia in D Minor, Eight different versions of Laat ons juichen. We also have Piano Sonata in C Minor, K.475, Piano Sonata in B-Flat Major, and many others.

16. Mozart: The Wonder Boy

Do you need a Mozart book with a unique and helpful illustration? If that is your desire, then the Mozart, The Wonder Boy is an excellent option for you. It features captivating stories. Also, the Mozart book adopts a simple approach. If you aim at developing your son's and daughter's interest in music early enough, this Mozart book will help you achieve your desire. The dimension of the book is 7.5 x 0.3 x 9.2 inches, while it contains 130 pages.

Zeezok Publishing, LLC published the book on December 1, 2006. One advantage of this book is that it is designed to draw the attention of children. Therefore, it is written in story form because children love to read as much as listen to stories. The book engages students at all levels, using different learning modalities to impact knowledge. With the Mozart, The Wonder Boy, your kid is sure to have the most entertaining and memorable learning experience.

17. Mozart: World History Biographies

This great book features outstanding people in history, and it employs a simple, easy-to-read approach. Apart from that, the content of the book is well-organized, and it is perfect for everyone who has a keen interest in music. Marcus Weeks and Julian Rushton author the book. Marcus Weeks is a musician that has written and co-authored several books. Some of his works are DK's Children's Illustrated Encyclopedia, A crash course, and many others. Julian Rushton is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds. Some of his publications are Mozart Musicians series, Mozart: An extraordinary life, and many others.

The book was published on July 9, 2013, by the National Geographic Children's books. Its dimension is 6.8 x 0.2 x 9.7 inches. The book contains about 64 pages, and it is written in English. The book features lively texts that are aimed at giving the reader a sense of appreciation of the legacy of Mozart timeless music.

18. Libretti of Mozart’s Completed Operas, Volume 2

Are you in search of an educative and easy-to-follow Mozart book? If that is true, then you should consider the volume 2 of the Libretti of Mozart’s Completed Operas. The operas included in this unique book are le Nozze di Figaro, ll Re Pastore, Lucio, Mitridate, Die Zauberflote, among others. The dimension of this Mozart book measures 11.1 x 8.8 x 1.5 inches. Furthermore, it was published on January 1, 1998, by Leyerle Publications.

If you are looking for a helpful book that will help you in your preparation for opera performance, then you should pick up this excellent book. Note that the Libretti collection is not a book of opera stories; it serves as a guide for every singer who has the desire to take part in an opera. The Libretti of Mozart's completed operas, Volume two, is a helpful book for opera singers as well as students.

19. Mozart WA Concerto No. 5 in a Major K

This book comes with all of Mozart Concerto No 5 in a major key, and it is a highly recommended book for all those that are interested in music. It is worth mentioning that the book features a piano/violin sheet. The dimension of the book is 10.9 x 9.3 x 0.5 inches. The International Music Company published the book.

The book is concise and easy to understand. The book is ideal for beginners as well as intermediate players. If you are keen on learning the piano or violin, you should not overlook this important book by Joseph Joachim.

20. Mozart 21 of His Most Popular Pieces

This unique Mozart book was published on January 1, 1997, by Alfred Music. It is written in English. The book comprises some of the famous works of Mozart. The book is easy to follow. The dimension of the book measures 9 x 0.2 x 12 inches, while it comprises of 64 pages. It can also serve as a perfect gift for anyone interested in music.

The Mozart book is ideal for beginners and intermediate players. It comprises playable pieces and easy-to-understand transcriptions. It will interest you to learn that the parts are drawn from rondos, sonatas, Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni. Some of the features of this book are helpful discussions, clear editing, precise, and straightforward approaches, among others.

Choosing The Best Mozart Books

Before choosing a Mozart book, you should consider factors like the relevance of the information provided, the author's reputation and experience, the experience of the past users, among other factors. We have carefully selected 20 unique Mozart books for you; go through their specifications and features, and choose the one that meets your requirements.

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Best books about Mozart

We pick out the best biographies about the great composer Mozart

BBC Music Magazine

Will we ever know the real Mozart? These fascinating books explore the great composer’s life and bring new insights into his world, inspirations and works, from his unconventional childhood to his untimely and mysterious death at the age of 35.

• 10 of the best books about Beethoven
• Twelve of the best books featuring classical music
• 5 of the best fictional composers

Mozart in Motion – His Work and His World in Pieces

Reviewed by Jessica Duchen

Like Laura Tunbridge’s book Beethoven – A Life in Nine Pieces , Patrick Mackie’s exploration of Mozart and his world takes a particular piece as the focal point for each chapter, from Don Giovanni down to the piano sonatas. Some sections flare into flame particularly well: Mackie is at his best when exploring the Enlightenment, its philosophers and other facets of Mozart’s cultural hinterland.

For instance, he brings to vivid life the decadence of 18th-century Paris as it slides towards the Revolution, and offers an intriguing explanation for the Piano Concerto K271’s mid-finale minuet: a connection with Victoire Jenamy’s father, the choreographer Noverre.

Nevertheless, this book is as much about literary virtuosity as anything else (fair enough, since Mackie is a poet, not a musician) and sometimes the text’s verbosity tends to obscure its philosophical arguments regarding the music. Marmite-fond readers may relish the chance to muse on the nature of Mozart’s genius and of creativity itself in tracts that spangle occasionally nebulous concepts with verbal bedazzlement. Others might reflect that the composer would have been too busy working to think in such terms, and that he used never a note too many.

Mozart – The Reign of Love

Reviewed by Kate Wakeling

‘Who wants to read about a happy man?’ asks Jan Swafford in the introduction to his terrifically engaging new biography of Mozart. Certainly the Mozart conjured by those ‘mythmakers’ of the 19th century was an enthrallingly tragic figure, steeped in penury and neglect. Swafford, however, refuses to take the bait and having written acclaimed biographies of Beethoven, Brahms and Ives, declares Mozart to be the ‘sanest’ of the lot.

This biography is thus crucially low on drama: Mozart is presented as neither a revolutionary nor victim, but rather a ‘jolly and informal man’ who was ‘supremely fastidious’ in his music-making. Swafford’s gifts as a biographer mean that this warm-spirited account of an essentially ‘happy man’ could not be more engrossing.

Packed with musical analysis and meticulous historical research, the book is written with a wit, grace and compassion that well befits its subject. For Swafford, the enduring power of Mozart’s music lies in the composer’s profound understanding of the human condition and in his tremendous capacity for love: of music, of his wife and of ‘humanity in all its gnarled splendour’.

Mozart in Context

Reviewed by Anthony Pryer

The eminent scholar Simon Keefe is joined here by 22 others to take us on a tour of the latest insights into Mozart’s interactions with the wider world. Revised evaluations abound. Mozart did ‘not fall from favour’ in his last years, his death aged 35 was ‘not unusual’ for that era (Schubert died at 31), Salieri’s supposed hatred of Mozart (as portrayed in the film and play Amadeus ) was actually directed at his librettist Da Ponte, not the composer, and female singers did not match modern voice production ideals because ‘corset wear’ constricted their diaphragms.

Importantly we learn that Mozart’s concept of the work was ‘more closely tied …to the act of performance’ than to a single text (see the various versions of the Piano Concerto K491). Sometimes the contributors disagree: for example, the Vienna chapter reports that his piano pupils were ‘invariably women’ whereas the ‘Instrumentalists’ section names two male students. This book is not simply a set of snapshots of Mozart from different angles, but a glorious grandstand view of 21st-century insights about him in his cultural settings.

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7 Best Books Which Show The Quirky Life Of Mozart

Mozart might seem like a genius, but these books will prove to you that he’s got a lot more to his name than talent.

Although Mozart deserves the respect and recognition for his work, it can be said that a large part of his personality has gone unnoticed. Which is difficult to imagine thanks to the many quirks this 18th century musician had to his name.

Apart from the curiosities of Mozart, you’ll also learn about his childhood, which truly reveals the talent that he is so well known for. All in all, these books deliver on their promise of a fun yet informative read.

Great inspiration for a little one starting out on the piano!

Navigate the article

#1   Mozart: The Man Revealed by John Suchet

Even in 2020, Mozart continues to fascinate with not only the amazing quality of his music but his bizarre life-story and persona. This book provides a thorough account of Mozart’s life, from the musical accomplishments to his harsh upbringing by his tyrannical father and quirky personality.

Sadly as we know, Mozart died young before he was able to create even more incredible music that would live long after he passed away. Overall this book does a great job of showing us Mozart’s life in its fullest, including 75 unique color illustrations, making it one of my favorite books on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s life.

Before buying a book make sure to compare price and outlet, we have included links below to several large book outlets for different regions in the world:

• Amazon (International)
• The Book Depository (International)
• Waterstones (International)

#2   Mozart: a cultural biography by Robert W. Gutman

Gutman does a great job of leading the readers through Mozart’s entire life, analyzing his work through political, cultural and artistic standpoint. It shows how Mozart’s life and personality have affected his work and vice versa. The book reveals Mozart in a different light – a man who is caring, affectionate, committed and incredibly loyal.

#3   Mozart In Vienna by Simon P. Keefe

This biography focuses on Mozart’s life as a composer and performer during the time he was in Vienna.. Not only does the book discuss his works, it highlight’s Mozart’s ability to cope with the never ending demand of the singers, performers, publicists, production and more.. Additional,y the author discusses Mozart’s personality and how it was impacted by his career. A must read.

#4   Mozart: A Life in Letters: A Life in Letters by Cliff Eisen

This fascinating work gives a deep insight into Mozart’s life and personality. Spanning a lifetime, these letters carefully collected by Cliff Eisen fill in many of the gaps music lovers and historians alike will gush over for hours (and in some cases lifetimes). Learn more about one of the greatest geniuses of human history in his very own words with this fascinating historical text.

#5   Mozart’s Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music by Jane Glover

This unique look into the life of Mozart takes an in-depth look into his relationships, inspiration, and profound respect for the women in his life. From his mother, sisters, wife, women patrons, lovers, and more—Mozart’s deep connection to women is often overlooked in biographies focusing on his seminal works. Glover steps into the canon and brings these important players and influences to life in stunning technicolor. Mozart could not have been without the women in his life, dive into an often untold and forgotten history with this groundbreaking book.

#6   W.A. Mozart by Hermann Ab

W.A. Mozart originally hit the scene in 1919 and blew music lovers and scholars out of the water. Abert’s in-depth research, analysis, and insight into the genius composer’s work and life were groundbreaking. However, over the last hundred years, the work of countless scholars gave us deep insights and new findings into Mozart’s inner world and life. That’s where Cliff Eisen, one of the formative Mozart scholars of our time, comes in.

He has beautifully updated this seminal text with great respect for the Abert original. You are sure to love this timeless classic, a pleasure to read, and a real treasure trove of knowledge for music-lovers and historians alike.

#7   Mozart: A Cultural Biography by Robert W. Gutman

Another true classic and must-read for music lovers and those curious about Mozart, this genius biography places Mozarts life and work into the broader context of musical development and culture in the 18th century. Gutman brings a level of nuance and complexity often lacking from other biographies, which can become too mired down in the details of Mozart’s art alone. Mozart: A Cultural Biography brings to light a luminous and deeply human Mozart—one who lived in a real-world, with real emotions, connections, and beliefs.

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Reading the Best Biographies of All Time

Review of “Mozart: A Life” by Maynard Solomon

11 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by Steve in Art / Sports / Entertainmt

≈ 3 Comments

biographies , book reviews , Maynard Solomon , Mozart , Pulitzer Prize nominee , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Maynard Solomon’s “Mozart: A Life” was published in 1995 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for biography. Solomon co-founded Vanguard Records, has taught at Columbia, Yale, Harvard and the Julliard School of Music, and authored several books including a highly-regarded biography of Beethoven .

Two things are immediately clear when reading this biography: it is built upon a foundation of assiduous (and likely painstaking) research…and it is not for the faint of heart. Solomon’s narrative is neither an easy-to-follow chronological treatment of Mozart’s life nor a particularly colorful one.  Instead, it is fact- and conjucture-dense, thematic and disappointingly dry with a puzzling predilection for psychoanalysis.

Most readers will conclude there is much about Mozart’s life which is simply unknowable but that Solomon diligently unearthed and analyzed every available bit of information. Unfortunately, the resulting narrative too often resembles the transcript of a tedious college lecture with little historical context, too much supposition and speculation, and almost no sense of narrative vibrancy. Very few readers will find the book hard to put down.

Great biographies generally provide robust introductions to a subject’s family as well as his or her most important friends and colleagues. In this case Solomon provides only the barest of disclosure relating to anyone other than Mozart’s father (whose presence throughout the book is pervasive), his sister (who receives her own admittedly excellent chapter) and Mozart himself. His mother and wife receive minimal coverage and his six children rarely appear at all.

Instead, the author exhibits a curious fascination with Mozart’s finances – a preoccupation so unrelenting that one might suspect the author of being a forensic accountant in a past life. But if this unyielding focus on 18th-century accounting appeals to some readers, what they may be disappointed not to find is a thorough and systematic analysis of Mozart’s musical compositions.

In addition, despite its Pulitzer imprimatur this biography fails to paint a cohesive or richly textured portrait of it subject. Readers unfamiliar with Mozart’s life are unlikely to finish this book feeling as though they really understand him or have a good sense of what made him tick. In the end, he seems oddly inert and unexpectedly…uninteresting.

But Solomon’s biography is not without its high points. His focus on Mozart’s relationship with his father, though far too Freudian, is interesting. The chapter on his relationship with his sister and their eventual estrangement is fascinating. And the chapter covering Mozart’s Masonic membership provides revealing insight into his character and motivations. But the pages which explore Mozart’s Zoroastran “riddles” may be the most unexpected and intellectually compelling of the book.

Overall, Maynard Solomon’s “ Mozart: A Life ” is a fact- and conjecture-rich biography of one of the 18th century’s most creative and unsettled artists. But if Mozart’s life was multi-hued and utterly captivating (as I suspect it was) Solomon almost entirely fails to capture that magic. And in the end his biography of Mozart, which is likely to appeal only to a narrow audience, is disappointingly dry and dull.

Overall rating: 2½ stars

3 thoughts on “Review of “Mozart: A Life” by Maynard Solomon”

July 11, 2019 at 10:34 am

I’m so glad I’m not the only who found this dry, and it’s especially reassuring to know that I’m not the only one who caught Solomon’s bizarre fascination with Mozart’s monies.

I’d read Jan Swafford’s Brahms and Beethoven biographies (both of which have my highest recommendation) and I had sorely hoped that Solomon’s Mozart biography would be equally good. I was disappointed.

July 11, 2019 at 11:04 am

I’m glad to hear Swafford’s biographies are written in a different literary style! I had planned to tackle Solomon’s bio of Beethoven in the next year or so but now I think I’ll swap it for one of Swafford’s. Thanks for the tip!

February 17, 2020 at 10:29 am

I echo everything Terry93D said. Thought Solomon’s bio of Mozart was positively boring but loved Swfford’s bio of Brahms (I think Brahms’ incredibly strange relationship with the Schumanns is ripe for movie treatment). Have Swafford’s bio of Beethoven on my night table as one of my next reads. Looking forward to it!

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Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces

Biographies of composers are a relatively recent genre; those of Mozart were among the first examples. Though his life was not as sensational as that of Gesualdo, for example, who murdered his wife, Mozart was, from his early years, an international celebrity whose very personality posed questions beyond the eternal riddle of creativity. How could a mere child—he started performing publicly on the clavichord at the age of six—be so astoundingly versatile? As he toured Europe, going from court to court and salon to salon with his father, Leopold, and his older sister, Maria Anna—a talented musician as well—the delightful little boy in his nattily embroidered outfits enchanted his listeners, readily obliging them with requests, however crass: now playing with the keys covered, now with only one finger, to delighted applause.

All this technical skill and musical inventiveness appeared to be self-taught, a somewhat counterintuitive notion since Leopold, a distinguished composer and court musician and the author of a widely read treatise on violin-playing, was a renowned teacher. But both the first published account of Mozart’s life, the Nekrolog (obituary) brought out by Friedrich Schlichtegroll two years after the composer’s death, and the first formal biography five years later, by the Czech philosopher and critic Franz Xaver Niemetschek, cite many instances in which the six-year-old Mozart turns out to be smarter than his elders. In one story, his father comes home to find that the boy has tried to compose music. The notation on the page appears to be a blotchy blur, but on close examination it proves to be perfectly sound musically. On another occasion the boy asks a famous violinist why his instrument is mistuned by a quarter tone. The violinist pooh-poohs him; the instrument is brought forth, and Mozart is found to be right.

Their father immediately grasped the marketability of both Wolfgang and Maria Anna and whisked them off on tour in the fullest possible glare of publicity, much of it generated by Leopold. On May 17, 1764, just three months after Wolfgang’s eighth birthday, the readers of London’s The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser read an announcement of the forthcoming appearance of

the greatest Prodigy that Europe or that even Human Nature has to boast of. Everybody will be struck by Admiration to hear…a young boy of seven [ sic ] years of age play on the Harpsichord with such Dexterity and Perfection.

He had his detractors. A year later Leopold indignantly wrote to The Public Advertiser denouncing what he called Mozart’s “Defamers” for claiming that the boy was in fact a man—

a Man reduced by some defect of nature to an insignificancy of person, which conceals from the careless Observer his more advanced age—that he is now in his fifteenth, his twentieth or his thirtieth Year.

It was on that visit to London that the boy, confined to their digs while his father recovered from a throat infection, wrote his first, slight, but highly accomplished symphony, quickly following it with a second and third; he had already written a set of violin sonatas, much admired.

He never ceased, almost to the end of his short life—he died at thirty-five—to be a peerless performer and an astonishing improviser, but as he grew older his compositional genius began to assert itself. At fourteen he wrote the opera seria Mitridate, re di Ponto , and at sixteen, Lucio Silla , very ambitious and very long—three and a half hours of music. After being eclipsed for many decades by the later operas, both are now regularly performed.

Mozart’s early biographers had limited access to information about his touring years as well as the last ten years of his life in Vienna. Niemetschek reports the warmth of his reception in Prague, where Le nozze di Figaro was embraced in 1786 after its less than rapturous initial reception in Vienna and where Don Giovanni had its triumphant premiere in 1787, but the emphasis of these early chroniclers is heavily weighted toward his prodigious youth, and both insist on his childlike nature—playful, feckless, naive. Niemetschek in particular seems to idolize the composer, his only animadversion being incomprehension that his hero should have stooped to setting Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto for Così fan tutte . “Everyone,” he tuts, “was astonished that this man could have demeaned himself to waste his heavenly melodies on such a worthless libretto.” Otherwise, it is Mozartolatry all the way: “Who has once found Mozart to his taste will find little satisfaction in other music. And all this perfection he reached at an age when ordinary artists would hardly have completed their education!”

The next biography was another matter. It was written, or at any rate initiated, by Mozart’s widow Constanze’s second husband, the Danish diplomat Georg von Nissen, who in 1820, nearly thirty years after the composer’s death in 1791, began collating documents, including, crucially, some four hundred family letters given to him by Maria Anna. The old diplomat was shaken to the core to discover that in their correspondence Mozart and his family and friends were gleefully given to silliness and smut. This was not, he felt, how a great musician should be remembered, and he resolved to suppress a large quantity of the letters, in some cases actually rewriting them to give a more edifying impression of the late genius. Perhaps bowed down by exposure to so much high-spirited filth, Nissen died with the book unfinished, but the principles that informed his selection of material were adhered to even more rigorously by his successors. That, alas, was where the rigor ended; the book, when it finally made its sober appearance in 1829, was a shambles.

Curiosity about the life of the unaccountable genius was growing. As early as 1815 Johann Rochlitz, a German playwright, musicologist, and critic, published a letter of Mozart’s that offered a vivid account of how he composed:

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer…the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination. At this occupation I can, therefore, suffer myself to be disturbed; for whatever may be going on around me, I write, and even talk, but only of fowls and geese, or of Gretel and Bärbel, or some such matters.

This letter was quickly seized on as an example of the workings of genius, with the composer—innocent, childlike—a mere conduit for divine inspiration. Alas, it was exposed as a forgery by the archaeologist and philologist Otto Jahn. The English musical essayist Edward Holmes had in 1845 produced the first coherent and thoroughly researched life of Mozart, but it is with Jahn’s searching, methodical account of the composer, which appeared in four substantial volumes between 1856 and 1859, that modern Mozart studies truly began. Jahn articulated for the first time the aim of Mozartean biography:

To represent, not only what immediately concerns Mozart, but also the time in which he lived, his circumstances, and the persons with whom he came in contact, insofar as all these affected the development of his genius.

The Romantic sense of Mozart as emblematic of the doomed artist was by then already well established. Even at the time of his death, the curious circumstances of the anonymous commission of a Requiem Mass, left incomplete on his deathbed, became the subject of stories that he believed himself to be writing his own requiem. Not much later, sensational rumors that he might have been poisoned by the composer Antonio Salieri, his Viennese rival, made the rounds. In 1825 Alexander Pushkin, in political exile on his mother’s estate, became fascinated by newly revived rumors that some years after Salieri attempted to kill himself, he confessed to murdering Mozart. In his handwritten notes to the intense and compact play he wrote on the subject, Mozart and Salieri , Pushkin describes how someone in the audience on the first night of Don Giovanni was overheard hissing: it turned out to be Salieri. “An envious person who could hiss Don Giovanni ,” he wrote, “could very well have poisoned its creator.” There is some evidence that the poet, vivacious, full of practical jokes, yet able to concentrate fiercely, identified with Mozart.

At the beginning of the play, Salieri is brooding on how unworthy of his gift Mozart is:

Heaven! O where is justice when the sacred gift, Immortal genius, comes not in reward For toil, devotion, prayer, self-sacrifice— But shines instead inside a madcap’s skull, An idle reveller’s? O Mozart, Mozart!

Mozart enters the inn by chance, bringing a broken-down fiddler with him, and roars with laughter when the old chap stumbles discordantly through something from Don Giovanni . This to Salieri is not only sacrilege, an insult to great music, but also a slap in the face for those—as he keenly feels himself to be—less talented than Mozart. But worse than that, as he confesses later, Mozart has left all other composers so far behind that they have become meaningless:

I must stop him now, Or he will be the downfall of us all, Us ministers and acolytes of music, Not only me of humble fame…What good If Mozart should live on to reach new heights? Will music be the better? Not at all; Music will fall again, he’ll leave no heir.

The play, brief as it is, has extraordinary power and an unsettling atmosphere, offering an uncannily vivid glimpse of an entirely credible and many-layered Mozart.

From then on, Mozart belonged as much to the dramatist and the poet as to the musicologist. In his novella Mozart’s Journey to Prague (1855), the provincial German pastor-poet Eduard Mörike describes Mozart and Constanze, on their way to the premiere of Don Giovanni , making an unscheduled stop at the house of a hospitable family of rural nobility. Having been cordially dined and fêted by his hosts, amid much merriment Mozart informally takes them through the new opera, abetted from time to time by Constanze; but then, the mood changing, he describes his state of mind when he composed its penultimate pages. He plays them the scene in which the Commendatore returns to drag Don Giovanni down to Hell. “And now,” writes Mörike,

followed that whole long, terrifying dialogue which snatches even the soberest of listeners away to the borderline of human understanding and beyond it: away to where our eyes and ears apprehend the supernatural, and we are helplessly tossed to and fro from one extreme to another within our own hearts…. Whose heart is not moved, who would not be shaken to the innermost core with simultaneous ecstasy and terror?

Overwhelmed by what they have heard, Mozart’s hosts finally ask him what he felt when he was composing this shattering music. Mozart confesses to having felt a little dizzy:

“Suddenly an unwelcome thought stopped me where I stood.” (Here he lowered his eyes for a moment or two, and when he continued there was a scarcely perceptible tremor of emotion in his voice.) “I said to myself: Suppose you were to sicken and die this very night, suppose you had to abandon your score at this point—would you rest at peace in your grave?”

As clearly as in Pushkin’s playlet (which Mörike almost certainly would not have known), these pages crystallize the image of a death-haunted Mozart. In an exquisite and subtle touch, after the Mozarts have resumed their journey to Prague, the daughter of the house, the sensitive Eugenie, reflects on what she has seen:

The utter conviction grew upon her that here was a man rapidly and inexorably burning himself out in his own flame; that he could be only a fleeting phenomenon on this earth, because the overwhelming beauty that poured from him would be more than the earth could really endure.

The nineteenth-century view of Mozart was increasingly one of a huge talent tragically snatched away from the world when it had only begun to come into its own. As late as 1932 the English poet Sacheverell Sitwell opined: “The maturity of Mozart is lost to us. There are only hints of it in his final work.”

Biographies and scholarly studies continued to appear, but Mozart the man became immensely more vivid with the publication in 1938 of a three-volume collection of his correspondence, compiled, translated, and lightly censored by the Irish suffragette, Germanist, and subsequently wartime code-breaker Emily Anderson. This latter talent helped her unlock some of the Mozart family’s codes and elaborate word games, and the Mozart whom Nissen had done his best to suppress suddenly sprang into multidimensional life—funny, tender, profound, paranoid, pious, ribald, priapic, desperate, affectionate, censorious, arrogant, hardworking, often deeply eloquent. This revelation of the many-sidedness of his character changed the perception of his work, enabling people to discern its intense originality and infinite variety.

After World War II, in both Britain and in America there was a new curiosity about forgotten performance practices, whose discovery seemed to strip layers of varnish from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music in particular. In addition, a fuller probing of the theatrical potential of the operas of Handel and Mozart revealed unsuspected depths and dimensions in them. Books such as Brigid Brophy’s Mozart the Dramatist : The Value of His Operas to Him, to His Age and to Us (1964) and her husband Michael Levey’s The Life and Death of Mozart (1971) examined the historical and social settings out of which the music had sprung; while Charles Rosen—a longtime contributor to these pages—in The Classical Style (1971) wittily and combatively examined Mozart (alongside Haydn and Beethoven) and the musical vernacular he inherited and transformed:

What is most extraordinary about Mozart’s style is the combination of physical delight—a sensuous play of sonority, an indulgence in the most luscious harmonic sequences—with a purity and economy of line and form that render the seduction all the more efficient…. It is only through recognizing the violence and the sensuality at the center of Mozart’s work that we can make a start towards a comprehension of his structures and an insight into his magnificence.

Into this ferment of Mozartean exploration, Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus exploded like a hand grenade in 1979. Mozart was not, at that time, particularly present in the minds—or indeed the ears—of most theatergoers. When the casting director of the National Theatre approached my agent about my playing the part of Mozart, she was unable to pronounce the play’s name ( Ämajuice? Amardius? ). For the general public, Mozart was a rococo figure, his music tasteful, pretty, harmless: if you’d heard Eine kleine Nachtmusik you’d pretty well gotten the measure of him.

All that was to change. Shaffer had seen in Pushkin’s playlet the rudiments of a grand spectacle, framed, like so many of his plays, as a duel between two men of different generations. Pity and terror were inherent in the material; Shaffer added comedy, a highly effective recipe. He framed the story as a melodrama, with old-fashioned transformation scenes, including an especially effective one in which the doddering, ancient Salieri—played by Paul Scofield—sheds twenty-five years before our very eyes, vigorously rising from his Bath chair, throwing off his shawl, and straightening up while a powdered wig is fixed to his head. Shaffer made sure that my first entrance as Mozart was as shocking as could be, placing in my mouth quotations from the exuberantly scatological letters the young Mozart had written to his cousin. The story of Mozart’s doomed struggle to assert himself, oblivious to the unfolding of Salieri’s Machiavellian plot to destroy his career, was linked to musical extracts that were cunningly chosen for maximum expressiveness and underpinned every phase of the story.

Shaffer pushed Pushkin’s opposition—a worthy and virtuous journeyman confronted with pure genius—to a theatrical extreme; his masterstroke was having Salieri address the audience as fellow mediocrities, so that they become complicit in Mozart’s elimination. This sumptuous piece of theatrical atavism bore little resemblance to the actual events of Mozart’s life, but most nonpurist musicians happily accepted the melodramatization; quite apart from the thespian pyrotechnics, the sophisticated choice of music was a revelation. Many in the audience heard for the first time the Masonic Funeral Music , which opens and closes the play; the sublime Wind Serenade K. 361, which is the first music of Mozart’s that Salieri hears, immediately after being exposed to a cascade of filth as Mozart and Constanze romp around on all fours; and the disco-beat finale of the last act of The Abduction from the Seraglio. Sales of Mozart recordings soared.

For the actors in the play, there was a fierce challenge: how to do justice to Shaffer’s flamboyant melodrama while retaining some connection to the people we were playing. Luckily, I discovered the book that utterly changed my understanding of the man: Otto Deutsch’s Mozart: A Documentary Biography (1965). By reproducing virtually everything that had ever been written about Mozart during his lifetime in letters and in memoirs, it supplied a series of dazzling snapshots that added up to a complete portrait, from life. Finally I knew how to play him: I had met him on the page.

The Mozart literature is vast, a mighty corpus of scholarship, an Aladdin’s cave of research, a great collective attempt to reveal this most extraordinary of composers in all his many facets, both as a quintessential figure of his time and a unique and utterly original individual. Patrick Mackie’s Mozart in Motion aims not so much to analyze as to synthesize, hooking up ideas and welding them together to create complex edifices of thought. The form of the book has something in common with Laura Tunbridge’s Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (2020), but where her method is to focus on individual compositions, progressing chronologically from early successes to the composer’s final visionary works, Mackie, mercurially tracking back and forth across Mozart’s life, trains his microscope on a single movement, individual aria, or group of pieces, using them to illuminate a moment in European history, a school of thought, or a cultural phenomenon, and thereby to uncover the essence of Mozart’s enterprise. He has other strategies: sometimes he takes an unrelated work of art in another medium—a painting or a novel—and unpicks its strategies, uncovering in the process parallels to what Mozart was trying to achieve in music.

Chapter 1 (“In Motion”) focuses on Don Giovanni , plunging us headlong into its famous first night in Prague, perhaps Mozart’s greatest triumph. Mackie evokes the chaos backstage and out front, then goes in close on Leporello’s so-called catalog aria, in which he unrelentingly enumerates his boss’s pan-European conquests to his abandoned lover Donna Elvira: 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, but in Spain…in Spain, 1,003. “The awful truth is delivered here in a vein of brisk, outrageous comedy by a waggishly officious manservant. Whose side are these frisky violins on?”

This, says Mackie, exemplifies what made opera the most important art form of the late eighteenth century: the aria satisfies the cravings of listeners for pleasure and excitement “while also turning them inside out.” The idea of what an aria might be is profoundly challenged. Mackie then takes a characteristic leap:

Europe was wavering on the brink of the modern world, and Mozart became the key artist of the modern world because his music was so richly fired by so many of the factors and energies at work in this process.

At the end of the nineteenth century Wagner was held to be the quintessential artist of the modern world and Beethoven lauded as a revolutionary; Mozart, not so often. In a sense, Mackie’s book is a justification of this counterintuitive proposition: “Mozart was the sharpest analyst of this world, and his music lets us listen in to the heartbeat and the brainwaves of modern experience in the throes of its emergence.” There’s more to Mozart than meets the ear: “Thinking more deeply about the world in which he worked should also change how we hear his music; our ears should open to more of what those beautiful sounds chase after.”

Mackie wants to alert us to what he calls the trickier or darker aspects of Mozart’s music; over the remaining three hundred-odd pages he enlists psychology, musicology, art history, politics, and social history. It must be said that Rosen (whom he acknowledges in slightly patronizing form in the book’s endnotes) has been here before him, in The Classical Style :

Mozart was as unaccommodating as Beethoven, and the sheer physical beauty, prettiness, even, of so much of what he composed masks the uncompromising character of his art. It cannot be fully appreciated without recalling the uneasiness and even dismay that it so often evoked in its time, and without recreating in our own minds the conditions in which it could still seem dangerous.

But Mackie’s voice, and indeed his mercurial manner, make us think about Mozart quite differently from the more rigorously logical Rosen. His style is never less than exuberant. It has been compared to Mozart’s own, but to my ear it is more like Richard Strauss’s, vaulting, leaping, luxuriating in its own sound. But it perfectly expresses what he has to say:

The vim and the comedy of the catalogue aria are as exhilarating as its picture of a continent with its values upended by one man’s extravagant libido. But exhilaration is mixed here with cruelty, as the aria wheels through territories and categories with a spirit of violent flexibility drawn from Giovanni. Its expansiveness starts to feel grotesque, and so do the combinations of coolness and glee with which this odd manservant runs through the shadowy, crushing facts. The suaveness of the music leaves us nowhere to stand. Finally, the flighty, brutal mockery astir in the aria feels close to reaching out of the opera and turning on us. Are we inside or outside the world shown to us? We do not know whether to be fascinated or repulsed. The music is in motion and so is the opera’s moral world; we listen in inexorable motion too .

In essence, Mackie sees the composer, in whichever form he is working, as a dramatist. This is not a novel concept; what is new is the vertiginous way in which he conjures up a creative artist at full tilt. Sometimes his verbal virtuosity deserts him: “Paris was no longer even fully the centre of French politics even while it sought ever more pushily to define culture for the whole continent.” But then he’ll swiftly redeem himself with an epigram or an inspired coinage: going from salon to salon in Paris, providing entertainment and getting nothing back in return, Mozart became, he says, “a sort of door-to-door salesman of his own brilliance.”

Mackie takes the urgent, unsettled Piano Sonata in A Minor, K. 310, as the fulcrum of his chapter on Mozart in Paris, noting the composer’s much commented-on lack of engagement with the death of his mother while the piece was being written and quoting the shocking letter he wrote home as if she were still seriously ill, when she was in fact lying dead in the adjacent room. Mozart describes the huge success of the Paris Symphony , his favorite ice cream, anything but what had happened:

Maybe the shock of his mother’s death came not so much from the pain of her loss as from the fact that it had happened just as he was bracing himself for the seriousness and solitude that his creative identity would bring. Hereafter a side of him would be alone with his art, pressed up with it against the losses and promises of a modern world.

Here Mackie’s method fully reveals itself: to home in on a single piece, perhaps even a single movement or aria, slice it apart to gauge its character, examine everything that it contains—its historical moment, its musical procedures, its personal background—and thus offer a three-dimensional account of what is embedded in it, its DNA , as if it had been buried and needed to be probed for everything it could tell us about its creator and the vanished world of which it was a part. Mozart in Motion eschews both linearity and comprehensiveness, offering Mozart not only in motion—caught on the wing, so to speak—but at the center of his own universe.

Mackie’s examination of the so-called “Turkish” Violin Concerto no. 5, in A Major, written when the composer was nineteen or twenty, leads him to write about one of the central dilemmas of Mozart’s life: how to deal with his imperious, exigent, tough-loving father, Leopold. We’re introduced kaleidoscopically not merely to the old grump himself but to Salzburg and everything it represented for Mozart, for good or ill, including his relationship with the newly elected prince-archbishop, Hieronymus von Colloredo, for whom both Mozarts were, we are reminded, not merely employees: they were his servants. In this whirligig of a chapter we are also first introduced to Haydn, the most admired composer of his time. When in 1785 he hears the quartets that Mozart dedicated to him, he categorically informs Leopold that Wolfgang is the greatest composer known to him “in person or by name in the world,” a statement that must have been, for a son who had a highly complicated relationship with his father, a deeply moving thing to hear. But by then Mozart was twenty-nine, and his need for Leopold’s approval had ceased to be pivotal.

Mozart’s decision in 1781, at the age of twenty-five, to remain in Vienna was a double rupture, both from Salzburg and from Leopold’s immediate ambit, and it took some ruthlessness on his part to accomplish; things were never the same between them. But by then Mozart’s primary loyalty was to his genius. “Gifts in fairy tales and fables,” notes Mackie,

often bring dark results, and so too a gift on such a scale in the psyche will be trailed by shadows and wounds…. Displaying the grand talent can bring moods of utter absorption capable of effacing the world, and this may not help that world feel solid or nourishing, or make its responses seem trustworthy.

Mozart’s acceptance of the scale of his own talent set him apart from even those closest to him. “If such talent conveys sway and potency,” observes Mackie, “it can also bring neediness and insecurity. Mozart’s zest for communication came partly from his brilliance and partly from needing to find exits from its impasses.” Mackie gives an illuminating sketch of Colloredo, famous for allowing an officer of the court to kick his homegrown genius in the pants, after which Mozart resolved never to be anyone’s servant again. Yet Colloredo was no crass philistine, says Mackie, but “a substantial and talented man, a fine administrator who was also committed to at least some establishment version of enlightenment thought.” On being elected, he hung a portrait of Voltaire on his wall.

The Enlightenment—its aspirations, its contradictions, and its limitations—is almost a secondary character in the book, the increasingly unstable intellectual environment in which Mozart functioned. Mackie returns to it again and again, reading his music as an expression of its tensions:

Did figures like Voltaire and Rousseau really represent the future of the culture, or a past glory that had failed to change anything enough, or alien excitements by which the great city had consented to be stimulated or merely amused in passing? Mozart was on hand to inherit aspects of both their projects; his powers of osmosis were incalculable, and often enough involuntary too. The A minor sonata’s breakthrough is to suggest a version of modern culture capable of declaring its bleakest losses and uncertainties even while it maintains the most radiant surfaces.

We are always made aware of the intellectual currents of the time. In the chapter on the misnamed Jeunehomme Concerto (the talented young woman for whom Mozart wrote it was called Victoire Jenamy), we meet her father, Jean-Georges Noverre, one of the great figures of the cultural world of the late eighteenth century and the creator of ballet as we now understand it. It seems that Mozart wrote the concerto to curry favor with him. If so, the attempt failed, but the account of Noverre gives us a vivid glimpse of the theater of the time. Mackie remarks that “in art it is possible to be impatient and patient simultaneously; in fact great art relies on being so,” one of many epigrammatic utterances in the book, usually paradoxical in form, which may or may not mean anything. He seems determined to write in a certain manner; the gains of doing so are many, but not everything survives close examination.

What follows the Jeunehomme chapter, however, is of such surpassing brilliance that any epigrammatic excess is readily forgiven. It concerns Mozart’s relationship to the viola—“The Lowly Viola,” as the chapter heading has it. Mackie’s thesis is that Mozart, who was a perfectly good violinist, was drawn instead to playing an instrument that had the sterling quality of not being his father’s instrument and had a tonal range that had rarely been exploited. “It wants,” says Mackie,

to be as sonorous as a cello but as agile as a violin, and wants to live up in the air while making sounds better suited to ground level. Mozart’s interest may have been coloured by the ways in which the instrument hangs between two worlds…. [The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra] fills itself with sonic bridges and analogies between its vision of the orchestra and the viola soloist, and as a result the solo viola part ends up reinterpreting what soloistic music is meant to be. Far from rising above the orchestra as solo violins tend to do, its colours glint or glare or swim from right within the heart of the sound. It is like watching sunlight work its way through rich clouds.

The chapter enters into the heart of both the music and Mozart’s relationships with his father, Salzburg, and his art; it is a triumph of imaginative exegesis. As one reads, one is there, listening to the music as if for the first time, in the presence of the composer and his father, aware of all the tensions and the difficult love between them. At the same time, Mackie engages with the essence of Mozart’s art:

One reason to keep calling Mozart a classical composer in the widest sense is that his flights and expansions keep arching back towards comprehensiveness and coherence. So in this work every frisson of innovation comes alongside an insistent drive downwards into the solid earth of structure, and every gleam of melody brings broad stretches of orchestral sound in its train.

I know of no other writing about music that so completely reproduces the experience of listening to it. Boldly, Mackie sees the Sinfonia Concertante as a paradigm of the composer’s relationship with his father: “Whether or not they played it together, the piece suggests that the highest relationships have values of equality built in.” Is this musicology? Or a sort of novelistic projection? Or dramatization? Either way, it is hard to think of the music in the same way again:

Within it he can push deep into the sound of the Salzburg musical world, while projecting his artistic claims out onto the culture’s furthest reaches. He can ready himself to break with the little city without ceasing, meanwhile, to be immersed in whatever it still offers. He can be alongside his father without feeling ground down or boxed in. Becoming capable of teaching Leopold was one thing; an even finer achievement was staying able to learn from him.

Mackie is similarly riveting on Idomeneo , which Mozart wrote for Mannheim in 1781, a year that was momentous for him. Despite the rehabilitation of many of his early operas, this one, written when he was twenty-four, is still not among his most popular works, but Mackie makes us aware of the turning point it represents in the composer’s relationship to the genre, notably his growing certainty about what he wanted from it. Mackie notes the supremely confident way in which the young Mozart took over from his journeyman librettist, cutting the text, reshaping it, adapting it to the voices he had at his disposal in the company. Exile is the thread that runs through the chapter: his ongoing absence from Salzburg; the Mannheim court’s reluctant assumption of the Bavarian electorate in Munich; the exile of Ilia, King Priam’s daughter, after the fall of Troy—all fed into his work. Music itself, Mackie says, was in exile. Of the finished score, he writes, “In the end it does become possible to feel a little disengaged from the fervent and rather relentless splendour of the thing”; he is no abject Mozartolator.

At the end of the chapter, going just a little too far, as is sometimes his wont, Mackie begins to work up the notion that homelessness is the crucial clue not just to Mozart’s personal situation, or that of his characters, or even the court or the orchestra, but to all of his music:

Mozart’s finest concertos and symphonies can reveal themselves as brilliantly flexible narratives of errancy and homecoming, can amount indeed to existential allegories of the fates of psyches and societies pitched into change.

Well, yes, they could , but does that really illuminate them in any way? From time to time, the author falls into the essayist’s trap of believing that one idea is the key to everything.

Mackie is desperately keen to make connections, but sometimes they are strained to the breaking point. The chapter on The Magic Flute attempts to link the opera to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Speaking of the novels of the period, he floats this insight:

The novel grabbed hold of European literature over this period because as a form it was both satisfyingly monumental and tensely sceptical, and sonata form met the same need in music.

But sonata form has rules that can be adapted, to be sure, even broken, but only within a particular structure, whereas Tristram Shandy , for example, follows no rules whatever, making the form up as it goes along.

But these are mere differences of perception. In Mozart in Motion Mackie has brought intense imagination and a gift for making provocative connections to the life and work of a composer whom he illuminates as both an absolutely central figure of his time and one of profound and still startling originality. In his penetrating chapter on the last three symphonies, Mackie also does justice to the sheer intensity with which Mozart worked as he reinvented the form. One does not have to agree with his dismissal of the earlier symphonies to be exhilarated by his account of Mozart finally turning the full force of his genius on the genre:

Mozart’s voracity towards the past of the art, and also its present possibilities, powers the openness that threw his music into the future. His oeuvre bulges with ways of being both brilliantly and creatively unoriginal, of adapting or siphoning or twisting the music or projects of others; it can feel as if we were listening to hearing itself taken to a maximum level of hunger and creativity.

Mozart, he seems to be saying, puts new music into old pots, while Beethoven smashes the pots: Mozart’s final symphonies’ “lavishness flows from how ambitiously they rethink symphonic form in all its elements, and no evidence exists to establish some specific purpose that any one of them was separately tied to.”

Mackie brilliantly conveys Mozart’s titanic focus. He mentions the unfinished portrait that Joseph Lange, the composer’s brother-in-law—an actor by trade—painted of him. Mozart is in profile, wigless, so presumably at home. “Perhaps,” writes Mackie, “Lange’s closeness to some of the deeper vectors of Mozart’s life helped the picture combine breezy intimacy with a certain tender restraint.” The portrait has exceptional actuality, partly because it shows Mozart absorbed in something beyond the canvas—the score he’s working on, perhaps. To me, it is wholly convincing, like Martin Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio. In both cases we see a man whose brain gives him no rest, unendingly structuring and restructuring his thoughts—in Mozart’s case translating them into musical forms and impulses. Both men look worn out, drained by their creative processes.

The final chapter, naturally, concerns the requiem mass that Mozart was writing at the end of his life and that he left substantially unfinished. It was, famously, a mysterious commission from an allegedly unknown nobleman in honor of his recently deceased and beloved wife. Mackie is inclined to give this story the benefit of the doubt. “Perhaps,” he says, “there is some truth to the stories about some paranoia provoked in him by not knowing, as his health worsened and the days shortened.” Or perhaps, as a man of deep imagination and profound dramatic instinct, he connected to the unknown commissioner’s grief:

The vivid ardour of Mozart’s requiem is built to survive on the darkening historical terrain that was coming. The sweet decorative glee of the eighteenth century has been purged almost wholly from the requiem, right at the same time as it drains from history. But the music does not pause to regret what it jettisons, because its commitment is to the passionate artistic adventurousness that it safeguards and extends even as it does so. The weather in Vienna late in 1791 was especially awful. As the nights lengthened around Mozart’s dim apartment, he was composing something that would move beyond the ambiguities of his world and his situation precisely by grasping them so deeply.

Jan Swafford, in his Mozart biography, The Reign of Love (2020), writes, “ In the end there is only love . As it always did in the end for Mozart, love reigns, a love of hearts and minds and bodies.” This is touching but fails to do justice to the uniquely complex man and artist that is its subject. Mackie, coming at him from all angles, takes us very close to meeting Mozart himself—in motion, indeed.

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The astounding brilliance and abiding joy of Mozart

When people we love die young, it becomes difficult to think of them without an overlay of sorrow. If we are fortunate, we learn eventually to remember our lost for who they were in life, rather than through the pain of their departure. But that can take a long time — and, in the case of Mozart, audiences have been captivated for centuries by the sentimental tragedy of a doomed wunderkind, betrayed by life, misunderstood by his contemporaries and laid in what is invariably described as a “pauper’s grave.”

Jan Swafford makes it clear in the introduction to his admirable “ Mozart: The Reign of Love ” that things weren’t all so bad for the composer. “I believe the only profound tragedy in Mozart’s life was his early death, when he was on the verge of a new plateau in his art and, incidentally, on the verge of real prosperity,” he observes. Swafford, a composer who has written biographies of Ives, Beethoven and Brahms, calls Mozart “the sanest, most gregarious, least self-flagellating” of his subjects, fundamentally a happy man.

And a funny one, too, as shown through his correspondence, from which Swafford quotes generously. Victorians of all eras have been shocked by Mozart’s letters, and many were suppressed or censored until recently. And yet they are prose marvels that could have come from Henry Fielding; Swafford calls them “effervescent, hilarious, sometimes so obscene that they could clear your sinuses.” Small wonder that the author “laughed more while writing this book than any of my others, much of the time at things Mozart himself had written.”

All prodigies learn by imitation, but Mozart’s absorption was so immediate and inexplicable that his father made a note of the date. Led to the keyboard on the evening of Jan. 24, 1761, three days before he turned 5, he astonished his family by playing a piece that his older sister had been working on for days. Within half an hour, he played the piece again, and by then he had it memorized. Before he was 7, he played for royalty in Munich, Prague and Vienna; he wrote his first symphony at the age of 8.

The central figure in Swafford’s book is Mozart, of course, but the author is a skilled enough storyteller to create the world he lived in. For those of us given to looking back on other times as tidy, aristocratic and pretty much everything that the 21st century isn’t, Swafford offers a sharp corrective: “All cities stank in those days, the leavings of thousands of horses and tens of thousands of dogs in the walled confines making for a penetrating fetor. A visitor wrote that every street had its distinctive smell and they were all bad. Added to this was the misery of dust that billowed everywhere all the time, a compound of dirt and the desiccated filth of horses and dogs that got into your clothes, your house, your eyes, your mouth, sometimes your very soul.”

And yet Mozart prospered within this world, creating music of ever-blossoming grace and elegance: Indeed, it is partially his own work that inspires our rose-colored vision of his era. By the time he was in his late teens, he had written half a dozen operas, two of which are still part of the extended repertory. Before he was 30, he had perfected the string quartet, dedicating some of these compositions to his mentor Franz Joseph Haydn, who recognized that the young man had already surpassed him. And then there are the symphonies and the concertos and — never to be forgotten — those astonishing late operas, as different as can be but immediately recognizable as creations that could only be by Mozart.

Of the conclusion of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” perfect even within a plethora of perfection, Swafford writes: “ In the end there is only love . As it always did in the end for Mozart, love reigns, a love of hearts and minds and bodies.” (Mozart “never forgot the beds and the bodies, for all the trouble they cause,” the author adds wryly.)

Swafford sums it up: “In all its dimensions from inspired libretto to inspired score, in the harmony of character and action and musical realization, in its broad comedy and its bitter human wisdom, ‘Figaro’ is as close to perfect as Mozart ever came, which is to say as close as opera ever came.”

This is an excellent book on Mozart for both musicians and the general reader. The story is told in a lively, knowing style, without written-out musical examples but shot through with unfailingly erudite and impassioned discussion of the composer’s work. Only toward the end do we feel the huge absence that would be left by Mozart’s death — and Swafford’s evocation of the moment the composer knew he was dying is appropriately terrifying.

And yes, Mozart was indeed interred in what was called a “common grave,” but that was in accordance with the Viennese custom of the time. Nobody seems to have followed the cortège to the burial, which was outside the walls of the city (also by custom) — three long miles away on rough roads to St. Marx Cemetery. But Mozart’s sublimity was already recognized and his music was playing, through Vienna and then Europe and then throughout the world, where we may hope, even in such troubled times, that it will always be playing.

The Reign of Love

By Jan Swafford

Harper. 810 pp. $45

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) ranks with J.S. Bach and Beethoven as one of the greatest Western composers. His father, Leopold, was a musical pedagogue and a musician at the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. When Leopold began to give clavier-lessons to his seven-year-old daughter, Nannerl, her younger brother listened attentively, started playing it himself at the age of four, and was composing his first pieces at the age of five. Between 1762-1773, Leopold brought the two child prodigies on tours around the main European cities and courts, from Rome to London, hoping to promote his son’s future career. Young Wolfgang worked as a court composer for the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, but, desirous of a better salary and opportunities to compose operas, he resigned in 1773. After several years of visiting different cities in search of a suitable position, he settled in Vienna, where he spent the final decade of his life. At Vienna, he composed most of his greatest compositions, and his greatness was recognised by both established composers, such as Haydn, and up-and-coming ones, such as Beethoven. Despite his premature death at the age of thirty-five, he left a huge body of work, with masterpieces in sacred, orchestral, and chamber music, concertos, and opera.

In this interview, Simon P. Keefe recommends some books that can help us learn about Mozart’s music and penetrate it more deeply as we listen to it.

Simon P. Keefe is James Rossiter Hoyle Chair of Music at the University of Sheffield, a life member of the Academy for Mozart Research at the International Mozart Foundation in Salzburg and President Elect of the Royal Musical Association. He is the author of five monographs on Mozart, including Mozart's Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Marjorie Weston Emerson award from the Mozart Society of America, and editor of a further seven volumes for Cambridge University Press, including Mozart Studies , Mozart Studies 2 and Mozart in Context .

• The Letters of Mozart and his Family (3rd edition) edited by Emily Anderson
• Mozart: A Documentary Biography by Otto Erich Deutsch
• Mozart's Requiem: Reception, Work, Completion by Simon P. Keefe
• Mozart in Vienna: The Final Decade ( Kindle ) by Simon P. Keefe
• The Mozart Family: Four Lifes in a Social Context by Ruth Halliwell

Briefly, what was missing from the opening summary of Mozart’s life? You have given a quick synopsis of Mozart's life. It is perfectly fine as it stands.

One could perhaps give more emphasis to his travels as a child.  It is often estimated that, before moving to Vienna in 1781, he spent around a third of his life on the road, including the Grand Tour of 1763-66, his time in France and Germany (1777-79), and the Italian trips (1769-73).

In many ways, this is one of the core things that one needs to appreciate about Mozart and how he became such a cosmopolitan musician. He was exactly the right person to have had the experiences that his father Leopold organised for him during his youth. He had so much access to other musicians and styles. He also had the remarkable ability to process and absorb everything. He becomes such a cosmopolitan musician, with an international mindset, well ahead of what would have been remotely normal.

So, his travels, before he moves to Vienna in 1781, are particularly important.

The other thing that I sometimes wrestle with is whether Mozart’s prodigiousness in his youth is as remarkable as the music from the last ten years of his life. It strikes me that there is no easy answer to that!  Marginally, I’d favour the late music, which I have always found most attractive to study, although I have also worked and published on his early music.

Nevertheless, it is extraordinary how those two aspects of Mozart life and work go together. On the one hand, here is an incredible prodigy who has all these remarkable experiences in his youth. On the other hand, there is the extraordinary quality of the music that he produced throughout the 1780s up to his death in 1791.

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Often a question that comes up among Catholics is, “How could Mozart be such a committed Freemason?” Indeed, some of his compositions—such as The Magic Flute , the Masonic Funeral Music , and the secular cantata Die Seele des Weltalls— celebrate Masonic ideas. However, Pope Clement XII had already condemned freemasonry in 1738 for its reductive conception of Christianity. How serious was Mozart about his Catholic faith? He was very serious about both his Catholic faith and his status as a mason.

Yes, there was a controversial, sometimes confrontational, relationship between masonry and Catholicism in late eighteenth-century Europe.  Indeed, there was quite a complicated coexistence between them in Vienna and the Habsburg lands during the late eighteenth century.

This is partially because Joseph II was an enlightened emperor. He certainly had his faults and had a lot of difficulties to contend with. The end of his life – he died young in 1790 – is also a sad one.  He had to roll back many of his enlightened advances from the early 1780s, largely on account of the French Revolution and the nobility’s fear and uncertainty about what could ultimately happen in Austria.

However, Joseph II was a very devout Catholic and tolerant. That toleration extended not only to Jews and Protestants, but also to Masons. So, while the relationship between Catholicism and masonry was difficult in all kinds of ways, it was an acceptable relationship in late eighteenth-century Austria.

You put up the figure of Joseph II, who was not entirely orthodox. For example, sometimes he is known as the Sacristan Emperor because he overstepped his bounds and dictated many liturgical norms. He closed down monasteries unless, like the Cistercians, they dedicated themselves to parish ministry. So, there was a very rationalist strain that goes against the supernatural and Catholic tradition. Did Mozart have that same tendency? That is difficult to tell. You are right. In terms of orthodox Catholicism, Joseph II is a controversial and complex figure. But, yes, Mozart's precise religious views are difficult to determine.

The relationship between his religious views and those of his father is interesting, perhaps capturing a generational conflict. It is not that Mozart was not devout. He clearly was.

My sense from reading the Mozart letters is that there is less of a fundamental, critical interest in religion than there is for his father, Leopold.

Leopold is a wonderful figure in Mozart’s biography and wrongly maligned in some circles. The amount of effort that he put into nurturing Mozart, educating him, and taking him around Europe, was extraordinary. He was an intensely serious man, especially about religion. And there was some conflict between the two of them where religion was concerned. Leopold would say, “I accept that it is God's will that something should happen, but you must do everything you can to influence that situation.” Wolfgang's response was always, “Well if it is God's will, there is not much I can do about it.”

I interpret that not as a lack of interest in religion on Mozart’s part, but as a kind of formulaic statement. For example, when he states, “the most important thing next to my father is God,” he is saying what he wants his father to hear. This is not to say that he is not a devout or good Catholic, needless to say.

However, for Mozart, music was his life and his world. His father accuses him of not being very practical in the way that he thinks about life and moves through it. And, to some extent, this is a valid claim. Mozart was totally and utterly immersed in the musical world. Although he was influenced by other things, music was basically at the core of everything he did and thought about.

He says as much himself and tells his father, “I am completely immersed in music. I think about it all the time.” And everything else is a kind of adjunct to that.

Leopold’s religious way of thinking about things differs from his son’s.

"He was exactly the right person to have had the experiences that his father Leopold organised for him during his youth."

Your question is a good one, it is difficult to say where Mozart sat relative to a religious thinker, albeit a controversial one, like Joseph II.  Here, it is worth bringing Prince-Archbishop Colloredo into the equation, Mozart’s employer in Salzburg up until 1781.

Famously, Mozart detested Colloredo. Leopold detested him too, among other reasons because he was passed over for promotion.

Colloredo was haughty and dictatorial. However, he had to deal with a very difficult financial position. The previous archbishop (Schrattenbach) had been profligate, and Colloredo had to rein things in. The Mozarts took that personally and Wolfgang was desperate to get away from Salzburg from at least the mid 1770s onwards.

In the 1780s, both Colloredo and Joseph II rein back the lavishness of Catholic services. There was a maximum amount of time that a Mass could take, around three-quarters of an hour. This inevitably meant that music had to take a back seat.

Mozart composed little sacred music during the last ten years of his life. The vast majority of it, over ninety percent, precedes his move to Vienna in 1781. That is because there was no encouragement to write a lot of sacred music during the 1780s. Mozart, nonetheless, remained very interested in it, which is conveyed among other things in fragments he worked on.

Each of the sacred works from the Viennese final decade has an unusual genesis.

There is a bit of a mystery attached to the C-minor Mass, K. 427. Mozart probably wrote it in response to personal circumstances, perhaps relating to his marriage and/or his wife Constanze’s recovery from an illness. It was intended for Salzburg: for the so-called bridal visit, when Mozart took Constanze to visit Leopold and Nannerl in 1783.

The Requiem is also a one-of-a-kind, unfinished work from the end of his life.

The Ave verum corpus is a short work for Corpus Christi, either for first performance in Vienna, or more likely Baden.

They are wonderful works. Each is very different from the others. However, they are not central to Mozart's main musical business in the last ten years of his life.

Perhaps we can approach the same question from a somewhat different angle . We listen to Mozart because his music is spiritually enriching, in the broad sense of the term. The Christian spirituality of the sacred music of Bach and Bruckner often seems to suffuse their instrumental compositions. At least, that is how I hear it. However, Mozart’s non-sacred music, written at the height of the Enlightenment, strikes me as having a more humanistic than a religious orientation. The ethos of his music is more like that of Shakespeare or Molière than Dante. This question may sound silly or pompous, but to what extent does Mozart’s music convey certain spirituality or ethos, and to what extent is it Christian? That is a fascinating question. I am not sure I am properly equipped to answer it, though. I am not religious myself; I am an atheist but have great respect for and interest in religion.

It is also a difficult and personal question. You were talking about the values that you sense in Mozart’s music. I would agree. There is a strongly humanistic quality to his instrumental music. I hear it that way as well. My first book on Mozart, an outgrowth of my PhD dissertation, was on Mozart’s piano concertos and how Enlightenment themes are conveyed through them: collaboration, cooperation, and confrontations and their resolutions, and the way these are mapped out in individual movements and across the span of whole works. That is fundamentally a humanistic phenomenon.

I am not necessarily the right person to talk about Bach in this regard, although what you are saying is exactly what religious friends of mine would also say about his music. Bach’s music is quite remarkable too. How one interprets it is a different question. However, I certainly hear a humanistic quality coming through in Mozart’s instrumental music.

Even in Mozart’s operas, especially the ones in which he collaborated with the Italian priest and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, there are religious themes, sometimes implicit, at other times explicit. The impenitent Don Giovanni faces divine retribution. Così fan tutte is an exploration of human frailty. In Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus , Salieri attends the premiere of Le nozze di Figaro and is amazed at how an opera buffa concludes with a sublime chorus on forgiveness. Yes, I would not disagree with any of that. Whether one sees those as religious or humanistic themes is a different matter. I certainly would not regard them as exclusively religious, although they have religious resonance.

With opera, one needs to tread carefully in terms of where authorship and responsibility lie. An opera and its design derive from a collaborative process. Principally, it is a collaboration between the librettist and the composer. But there are many others involved, such as the singers, whose individual needs had to be factored into the equation. An opera’s status as an adaptation of an existing work, or as essentially a new work is also important. Figaro is an adaptation of the controversial play that Beaumarchais had written a few years earlier. In Don Giovanni's case, the Don Juan legend goes back at least 150 years, to Molière and others. Da Ponte expands the Don Juan legend considerably, relative to the main source he drew upon. He is without doubt a brilliant librettist. In contrast, he shortens Figaro because the play is much longer, convoluted, and has more characters than ultimately appeared in the opera. In other words, he makes it more concise. Così fan tutte is a combination of all kinds of earlier eighteenth-century sources and quasi mythological ones from the Renaissance.

One is perfectly entitled to see a religious dimension in Mozart’s operas, of course. I would argue that they could be represented in an Enlightened, humanistic way as well.

"When you travel through his repertory and listen to his music in different areas, you can hear bits of all these ways of thinking about music, different styles, different genres as you go through it. The quality is so high that it is an enriching experience in every way."

What attracted you, as a musicologist, to Mozart rather than any of the other great composers? That is a good question.

First of all, as an oboist in my younger days, I was attracted to playing Mozart’s well-known works for this instrument: the oboe quartet and the oboe concerto. That was probably my initial attraction to Mozart.

For me, Mozart’s sheer diversity of works and achievements is quite remarkable. There is probably more diversity to him than to any other composer in the late eighteenth century, as much as I admire many of them, especially Joseph Haydn.

One thing about Mozart is that he appears everywhere across the musical spectrum. He is a fantastic dramatist. He is also a fantastic pianist. He is an extraordinary composer of piano concerti, symphonies, and string quartets and other chamber music. In short, he has all bases covered. When you travel through his repertory and listen to his music in different areas, you can hear bits of all these ways of thinking about music, different styles, different genres as you go through it. The quality is so high that it is an enriching experience in every way. That he died at only thirty-five, makes his achievements all the more remarkable. No one is like him when it comes to covering so much musical territory. That is always one thing that I have always found attractive about Mozart.

There is also the Shakespearean way that he can turn on a dime. Suddenly, you can go from power to poignancy, from great emotion to reflection. He makes these pivots so adeptly, resourcefully and cleverly. That has always been extremely attractive to me as well.

Bach resorts extensively to counterpoint in his compositions, whereas Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms often develop movements or whole compositions out of a motif. Mozart’s compositional technique is harder to pin down. What are the distinct characteristics of Mozart’s music? How does his style of composition differ from that of his contemporaries? Sometimes, in old secondary literature, scholars explain how the eighteenth century moves from contrapuntal geniuses, such as Bach and Handel, to the less complex style of composers such as Haydn and Mozart.

I am very wary about thinking about things that way, though. Both Haydn and Mozart were extremely skilled writers of fugues, the highest form of counterpoint.

You asked how Mozart is different. It goes back to something I was saying earlier: his cosmopolitan qualities.

In many ways, it is difficult to talk about him as a Viennese composer, a Salzburg composer, or even an Austrian composer (insofar as Austria existed at that time). Rather, he absorbs so many styles and ways of thinking about music. This comes out in all sorts of ways in his music.

Some people parse this state of affairs qualitatively. That is fine. Not many will dispute that, qualitatively, Mozart surpasses every other late eighteenth-century composer, with the possible exception of Haydn.

However, we need not think about things in this way. We can also think about how style transmits itself over the course of a work. There are so many aspects to his music. Mozart can be both suave and then slightly crude or crass, both poignant and powerful - and all within the space of minutes!

Mozart demonstrates complete control of his material – what it expresses, and what it represents. This applies equally to his instrumental and vocal music, including his operas.

Four of the five books that you have recommended are biographical. Is it essential to know about Mozart’s life and context to appreciate his music, or merely helpful? Again, this is a good question. I would say that it is essential to have some biographical understanding, broadly construed.

The books I have chosen are predominantly biographical, although not all are biographies in a conventional sense.

As I was saying earlier, Mozart is immersed in music the whole time. The classic way of thinking about him is that, as he said himself, all the composing goes on in his head, and is then written down. This is a simplification, all told, emanating both from Mozart and from many of his biographers.

However, he lived constantly with music and was totally absorbed in it. So, you need to understand what he is going through, and how he progresses through life in order to get a sense of what his music may or may not mean relative to his circumstances, including how it is significant (or not).

What is biography? This is the heart of the question here. Biography is much more than simply telling a tale of someone’s life and works. It needs to be considerably more nuanced and sophisticated than that. Hopefully, this comes through in the books I have chosen.

"When you dip into the letters, you can still hear Mozart thinking through all sorts of issues. His personality comes alive for us."

Your first selected book is Emily Anderson’s edition of letters of Mozart and his family. What makes them a good read and how they help us appreciate Mozart’s music? This is Mozart from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. There is so much here that is relevant to his life and his music. We have his views on aesthetics and instrumental music. We have the practicalities of life, such as issues relating to travel. We have references to other musicians. We learn about his emotions and relationships. He speaks to us directly.

My latest book project was a study of the reception of Haydn and Mozart in the nineteenth century ( Haydn and Mozart in the Long Nineteenth Century: Parallel and Intersecting Patterns of Reception published by Cambridge University Press in 2023). I had to look at a lot of the early biographies in the course of my work. One is particularly problematic, and was written by Constanze Mozart's second husband, Georg Nikolaus von Nissen.

Nissen’s biography is kind of patchwork quilt. It pulls together numerous previously published sources. Nowadays, we would say that it was plagiarised, but plagiarism did not exist in the same way in the early nineteenth century as it does today.

Its major contribution was to publish, for the first time, enormous tranches of letters, mainly from Constanze and Nannerl. In the reviews of the late 1820s, it is clear that readers cannot believe that this is Mozart suddenly speaking. To them, this kind of immediacy, thirty years after Mozart's death, was extraordinary. We cannot expect now that experience of the letters’ novelty and the great release of all these ideas. The words, phraseology, and so on have been discussed and dissected with a fine-tooth comb. However, when you dip into the letters, you can still hear Mozart thinking through all sorts of issues. His personality comes alive for us, even if Anderson’s translation is a bit too Victorian and makes him sound as if he were from the late nineteenth century rather than the late eighteenth. Mozart wrote in a Salzburgian dialect, and not particularly elegantly. However, Anderson translates the letters into elegant prose. This is problematic, but does not bother me unduly, because Mozart’s ideas and personality still come alive throughout.

It is fantastic to read them from cover to cover or just to dip into them.

The correspondence between Mozart and his father represents the letters at their best and most engaging.

For example, Idomeneo premiered in Munich at the end of January 1781, when Mozart was still based in Salzburg. Mozart went to Munich a few months before in order to discuss the music with the singers and to carry out and complete the work. Meanwhile, the librettist, Giambattista Varesco, was based in Salzburg. Leopold became the go-between for Mozart and Varesco. You can see the drama and the music taking shape for both of them in their letters. Leopold has his say about how Idomeneo should function dramatically and musically. There is this wonderful correspondence for two or three months—between the end of 1780 and the beginning of 1781—that is all about musical ideas, how instruments should function, and other practical issues.

Idomeneo , incidentally, was a great success in Munich. In these letters, we witness the genesis of the opera in front of our eyes. They are a wonderful read.

The relationship between Leopold and Mozart certainly had its difficult and problematic moments. At their very best, though, Mozart and Leopold were great thinkers about music.

"If you write a boring biography on Mozart, you have failed because there are so many interesting things to say about him."

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The best Mozart Biography?

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Blog – Posted on Monday, Jan 21

The 30 best biographies of all time.

Biographer Richard Holmes once wrote that his work was “a kind of pursuit… writing about the pursuit of that fleeting figure, in such a way as to bring them alive in the present.”

At the risk of sounding cliché, the best biographies do exactly this: bring their subjects to life. A great biography isn’t just a laundry list of events that happened to someone. Rather, it should weave a narrative and tell a story in almost the same way a novel does. In this way, biography differs from the rest of nonfiction .

All the biographies on this list are just as captivating as excellent novels , if not more so. With that, please enjoy the 30 best biographies of all time — some historical, some recent, but all remarkable, life-giving tributes to their subjects.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great biographies out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized biography recommendation  😉

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1. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

This biography of esteemed mathematician John Nash was both a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and the basis for the award-winning film of the same name. Nasar thoroughly explores Nash’s prestigious career, from his beginnings at MIT to his work at the RAND Corporation — as well the internal battle he waged against schizophrenia, a disorder that nearly derailed his life.

2. Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game - Updated Edition by Andrew Hodges

Hodges’ 1983 biography of Alan Turing sheds light on the inner workings of this brilliant mathematician, cryptologist, and computer pioneer. Indeed, despite the title ( a nod to his work during WWII ), a great deal of the “enigmatic” Turing is laid out in this book. It covers his heroic code-breaking efforts during the war, his computer designs and contributions to mathematical biology in the years following, and of course, the vicious persecution that befell him in the 1950s — when homosexual acts were still a crime punishable by English law.

3. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is not only the inspiration for a hit Broadway musical, but also a work of creative genius itself. This massive undertaking of over 800 pages details every knowable moment of the youngest Founding Father’s life: from his role in the Revolutionary War and early American government to his sordid (and ultimately career-destroying) affair with Maria Reynolds. He may never have been president, but he was a fascinating and unique figure in American history — plus it’s fun to get the truth behind the songs.

Prefer to read about fascinating First Ladies rather than almost-presidents? Check out this awesome list of books about First Ladies over on The Archive.

4. Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston

A prolific essayist, short story writer, and novelist, Hurston turned her hand to biographical writing in 1927 with this incredible work, kept under lock and key until it was published 2018. It’s based on Hurston’s interviews with the last remaining survivor of the Middle Passage slave trade, a man named Cudjo Lewis. Rendered in searing detail and Lewis’ highly affecting African-American vernacular, this biography of the “last black cargo” will transport you back in time to an era that, chillingly, is not nearly as far away from us as it feels.

5. Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert

Though many a biography of him has been attempted, Gilbert’s is the final authority on Winston Churchill — considered by many to be Britain’s greatest prime minister ever. A dexterous balance of in-depth research and intimately drawn details makes this biography a perfect tribute to the mercurial man who led Britain through World War II.

Just what those circumstances are occupies much of Bodanis's book, which pays homage to Einstein and, just as important, to predecessors such as Maxwell, Faraday, and Lavoisier, who are not as well known as Einstein today. Balancing writerly energy and scholarly weight, Bodanis offers a primer in modern physics and cosmology, explaining that the universe today is an expression of mass that will, in some vastly distant future, one day slide back to the energy side of the equation, replacing the \'dominion of matter\' with \'a great stillness\'--a vision that is at once lovely and profoundly frightening.

Without sliding into easy psychobiography, Bodanis explores other circumstances as well; namely, Einstein's background and character, which combined with a sterling intelligence to afford him an idiosyncratic view of the way things work--a view that would change the world. --Gregory McNamee

6. E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

This “biography of the world’s most famous equation” is a one-of-a-kind take on the genre: rather than being the story of Einstein, it really does follow the history of the equation itself. From the origins and development of its individual elements (energy, mass, and light) to their ramifications in the twentieth century, Bodanis turns what could be an extremely dry subject into engaging fare for readers of all stripes.

7. Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

When Enrique was only five years old, his mother left Honduras for the United States, promising a quick return. Eleven years later, Enrique finally decided to take matters into his own hands in order to see her again: he would traverse Central and South America via railway, risking his life atop the “train of death” and at the hands of the immigration authorities, to reunite with his mother. This tale of Enrique’s perilous journey is not for the faint of heart, but it is an account of incredible devotion and sharp commentary on the pain of separation among immigrant families.

8. Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera

Herrera’s 1983 biography of renowned painter Frida Kahlo, one of the most recognizable names in modern art, has since become the definitive account on her life. And while Kahlo no doubt endured a great deal of suffering (a horrific accident when she was eighteen, a husband who had constant affairs), the focal point of the book is not her pain. Instead, it’s her artistic brilliance and immense resolve to leave her mark on the world — a mark that will not soon be forgotten, in part thanks to Herrera’s dedicated work.

9. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Perhaps the most impressive biographical feat of the twenty-first century, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about a woman whose cells completely changed the trajectory of modern medicine. Rebecca Skloot skillfully commemorates the previously unknown life of a poor black woman whose cancer cells were taken, without her knowledge, for medical testing — and without whom we wouldn’t have many of the critical cures we depend upon today.

10. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, hitchhiked to Alaska and disappeared into the Denali wilderness in April 1992. Five months later, McCandless was found emaciated and deceased in his shelter — but of what cause? Krakauer’s biography of McCandless retraces his steps back to the beginning of the trek, attempting to suss out what the young man was looking for on his journey, and whether he fully understood what dangers lay before him.

11. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families by James Agee

"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” From this line derives the central issue of Agee and Evans’ work: who truly deserves our praise and recognition? According to this 1941 biography, it’s the barely-surviving sharecropper families who were severely impacted by the American “Dust Bowl” — hundreds of people entrenched in poverty, whose humanity Evans and Agee desperately implore their audience to see in their book.

12. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

Another mysterious explorer takes center stage in this gripping 2009 biography. Grann tells the story of Percy Fawcett, the archaeologist who vanished in the Amazon along with his son in 1925, supposedly in search of an ancient lost city. Parallel to this narrative, Grann describes his own travels in the Amazon 80 years later: discovering firsthand what threats Fawcett may have encountered, and coming to realize what the “Lost City of Z” really was.

13. Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang

Though many of us will be familiar with the name Mao Zedong, this prodigious biography sheds unprecedented light upon the power-hungry “Red Emperor.” Chang and Halliday begin with the shocking statistic that Mao was responsible for 70 million deaths during peacetime — more than any other twentieth-century world leader. From there, they unravel Mao’s complex ideologies, motivations, and missions, breaking down his long-propagated “hero” persona and thrusting forth a new, grislier image of one of China’s biggest revolutionaries.

14. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted by Andrew Wilson by Andrew Wilson

Titled after one of her most evocative poems, this shimmering bio of Sylvia Plath takes an unusual approach. Instead of focusing on her years of depression and tempestuous marriage to poet Ted Hughes, it chronicles her life before she ever came to Cambridge. Wilson closely examines her early family and relationships, feelings and experiences, with information taken from her meticulous diaries — setting a strong precedent for other Plath biographers to follow.

15. The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes

What if you had twenty-four different people living inside you, and you never knew which one was going to come out? Such was the life of Billy Milligan, the subject of this haunting biography by the author of Flowers for Algernon . Keyes recounts, in a refreshingly straightforward style, the events of Billy’s life and how his psyche came to be “split”... as well as how, with Keyes’ help, he attempted to put the fragments of himself back together.

16. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder

This gorgeously constructed biography follows Paul Farmer, a doctor who’s worked for decades to eradicate infectious diseases around the globe, particularly in underprivileged areas. Though Farmer’s humanitarian accomplishments are extraordinary in and of themselves, the true charm of this book comes from Kidder’s personal relationship with him — and the sense of fulfillment the reader sustains from reading about someone genuinely heroic, written by someone else who truly understands and admires what they do.

17. Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

Here’s another bio that will reshape your views of a famed historical tyrant, though this time in a surprisingly favorable light. Decorated scholar Andrew Roberts delves into the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, from his near-flawless military instincts to his complex and confusing relationship with his wife. But Roberts’ attitude toward his subject is what really makes this work shine: rather than ridiculing him ( as it would undoubtedly be easy to do ), he approaches the “petty tyrant” with a healthy amount of deference.

18. The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV by Robert A. Caro

Lyndon Johnson might not seem as intriguing or scandalous as figures like Kennedy, Nixon, or W. Bush. But in this expertly woven biography, Robert Caro lays out the long, winding road of his political career, and it’s full of twists you wouldn’t expect. Johnson himself was a surprisingly cunning figure, gradually maneuvering his way closer and closer to power. Finally, in 1963, he got his greatest wish — but at what cost? Fans of Adam McKay’s Vice , this is the book for you.

19. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Anyone who grew up reading Little House on the Prairie will surely be fascinated by this tell-all biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Caroline Fraser draws upon never-before-published historical resources to create a lush study of the author’s life — not in the gently narrated manner of the Little House series, but in raw and startling truths about her upbringing, marriage, and volatile relationship with her daughter (and alleged ghostwriter) Rose Wilder Lane.

20. Prince: A Private View by Afshin Shahidi

Compiled just after the superstar’s untimely death in 2016, this intimate snapshot of Prince’s life is actually a largely visual work — Shahidi served as his private photographer from the early 2000s until his passing. And whatever they say about pictures being worth a thousand words, Shahidi’s are worth more still: Prince’s incredible vibrance, contagious excitement, and altogether singular personality come through in every shot.

21. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss

Could there be a more fitting title for a book about the husband-wife team who discovered radioactivity? What you may not know is that these nuclear pioneers also had a fascinating personal history. Marie Sklodowska met Pierre Curie when she came to work in his lab in 1891, and just a few years later they were married. Their passion for each other bled into their passion for their work, and vice-versa — and in almost no time at all, they were on their way to their first of their Nobel Prizes.

22. Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

She may not have been assassinated or killed in a mysterious plane crash, but Rosemary Kennedy’s fate is in many ways the worst of “the Kennedy Curse.” As if a botched lobotomy that left her almost completely incapacitated weren’t enough, her parents then hid her away from society, almost never to be seen again. Yet in this new biography, penned by devoted Kennedy scholar Kate Larson, the full truth of Rosemary’s post-lobotomy life is at last revealed.

23. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

This appropriately lyrical biography of brilliant Jazz Age poet and renowned feminist, Edna St. Vincent Millay, is indeed a perfect balance of savage and beautiful. While Millay’s poetic work was delicate and subtle, the woman herself was feisty and unpredictable, harboring unusual and occasionally destructive habits that Milford fervently explores.

24. Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes

Holmes’ famous philosophy of “biography as pursuit” is thoroughly proven here in his first full-length biographical work. Shelley: The Pursuit details an almost feverish tracking of Percy Shelley as a dark and cutting figure in the Romantic period — reforming many previous historical conceptions about him through Holmes’ compelling and resolute writing.

25. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

Another Gothic figure has been made newly known through this work, detailing the life of prolific horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson. Author Ruth Franklin digs deep into the existence of the reclusive and mysterious Jackson, drawing penetrating comparisons between the true events of her life and the dark nature of her fiction.

26. The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel

Fans of Into the Wild and The Lost City of Z will find their next adventure fix in this 2017 book about Christopher Knight, a man who lived by himself in the Maine woods for almost thirty years. The tale of this so-called “last true hermit” will captivate readers who have always fantasized about escaping society, with vivid descriptions of Knight’s rural setup, his carefully calculated moves and how he managed to survive the deadly cold of the Maine winters.

27. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The man, the myth, the legend: Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, is properly immortalized in Isaacson’s masterful biography. It divulges the details of Jobs’ little-known childhood and tracks his fateful path from garage engineer to leader of one of the largest tech companies in the world — not to mention his formative role in other legendary companies like Pixar, and indeed within the Silicon Valley ecosystem as a whole.

28. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

Olympic runner Louis Zamperini was just twenty-six when his US Army bomber crashed and burned in the Pacific, leaving him and two other men afloat on a raft for forty-seven days — only to be captured by the Japanese Navy and tortured as a POW for the next two and a half years. In this gripping biography, Laura Hillenbrand tracks Zamperini’s story from beginning to end… including how he embraced Christian evangelism as a means of recovery, and even came to forgive his tormentors in his later years.

29. Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff

Everyone knows of Vladimir Nabokov — but what about his wife, Vera, whom he called “the best-humored woman I have ever known”? According to Schiff, she was a genius in her own right, supporting Vladimir not only as his partner, but also as his all-around editor and translator. And she kept up that trademark humor throughout it all, inspiring her husband’s work and injecting some of her own creative flair into it along the way.

30. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt

William Shakespeare is a notoriously slippery historical figure — no one really knows when he was born, what he looked like, or how many plays he wrote. But that didn’t stop Stephen Greenblatt, who in 2004 turned out this magnificently detailed biography of the Bard: a series of imaginative reenactments of his writing process, and insights on how the social and political ideals of the time would have influenced him. Indeed, no one exists in a vacuum, not even Shakespeare — hence the conscious depiction of him in this book as a “will in the world,” rather than an isolated writer shut up in his own musty study.

If you're looking for more inspiring nonfiction, check out this list of 30 engaging self-help books , or this list of the last century's best memoirs !

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