Lives: Mozart Book

Matching Peter Gay, the historian of the Enlightenment, with Mozart, the composer who perhaps best embodies that period, was an intelligent move on the part of the editors of this series of short lives. Mozart is a book which combines accuracy with enthusiasm and an intelligent sense of how it felt to be an active musician, a loving husband and a good son in a particular time and place. Gay stresses the problems of Mozart's relationship with his father, who saw his son's talent less as a gift from God to humanity than as a way of ensuring a comfortable old age for himself; it is almost impossible to write a biography of Mozart in which old Leopold comes out well, but Gay makes an effort to see matters from his point of view: "He was Mozart's teacher, collaborator, advisor, nurse, secretary, impresario, press agent and chief claqueur ... mixed motives governed Leopold Mozart's ways with his son. They were darkened by his irrational financial worries and his need to manage Mozart's every move. Yet his laments also sound a tone of real apprehension that goes beyond manipulative mendacity." Gay is good on the shift in Mozart's career from salaried servant to virtuoso, dependent on public taste; on the marriage to Costanza and on the doomed last months. His Mozart is perhaps less clever than some biographers' and less rackety--but this is a coherent and informative short account in which the music always takes precedence over Gay's psychological readings--without heavy handedness, he periodically reminds us that he is also the biographer of Freud. - -RozKaveneyRead More