Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford

Mozart: The Reign of Love Reviews

• 
  Jonathan O'Neill

  Just did an Amazon search for this book - 'Mozart: The Reign of Love
  
  Glancing down to the 'Products related to this item' section, I was more than a little amused to see the title, 'Semen Retention Benefits: A Transmutation of Your Life Energy'.
  
  We're gonna need to do some work on those algorithms, Amazon!
• 
  Phillip Oliver

  This is an exhaustive biography of Mozart (832 pages) that covers his life in intricate detail and examines the brilliance of his music as well as the complexities of his character and family life. The book also dispels the many historical inaccuries and myths that been ingrained into the public consciousness over the years through liberties taken in film and theatrical depictions as well as gossip. Fortunately for biographers, Mozart's life was well-documented through letters. Indeed, his father, realizing his son's talents and the importance of his legacy, made a concerted effort to record the minute details of their travels, performances and the public's reaction to them. The author does a remarkable job at describing life during this time. The first half of the book, which details the many “concert tours” that Mozart and his sister Nannerl made beginning when Mozart was only five years old, is particularly vivid. The book is as much a biography of Mozart's father (Leopold) as it is him, detailing his drives and desires to immortalize his son. Mozart's relationships with his sister, mother and wife are also closely examined. The descriptions of life during the time is also quite fascinating. The only part of the book I didn't enjoy were the lengthy and technical descriptions of Mozart's work. Readers who have a knowledge of music will no doubt find these analyses worthwhile (the author is a musician himself) but non-musicians like myself, will probably begin skimming. An appendix of musical forms in Mozart's time, bibliography, works cited and an index of musical compositions is included.
• 
  Robert Sheard

  There's only ever been one criticism of Mozart's music (and it's wrong, of course): "too many notes."
  
  That's actually the criticism I have of Swafford's biography. At 740 densely-packed pages, it's at least 250 pages too long because Swafford is really doing two things here where only one was necessary. The first is the actual biography of Mozart's all-too-brief life and miraculous career, starting when he was five years old and a prodigy through to his death at age 35, while racing to finish his greatest sacred work, his Requiem.
  
  But within each chapter, many of which are devoted to the periods of individual tours of Europe or devoted to the periods surrounding the composition of major works, Swafford includes detailed, complicated, and frankly tedious analyses of the musical forms, keys, and the development of individual works, even to the level of individual phrases. It's just "too many notes." A lay reader without an extensive musical theory background is going to get little out of those sections and they completely distract from the wonderful biographical flow of Mozart's life and career. Had he left those sections at a bare minimum, I'd be praising this book much more highly.
  
  A real joy to come from reading this biography, however, was the excuse to re-explore much of Mozart's body of work. Just imagine if he had lived another five decades, as his wife did.
• 
  Kristianne

  Whew, I finally made it through this 800-page book! I feel like I could be an expert on Mozart now! XD Really though, this was a fascinating read and I learned so much not only about Mozart and his process, but also about musical forms of that time. The author does include extensive analysis on most of Mozart's major works, so if you're looking for just a straightforward biography, this might not be the book for you, especially if you're not a huge classical music person. ;)
  
  Content: The author does reference many of Mozart's letters that include his crude jokes and humor. Also, he is rather candid at times about the portrayal of sexual themes in Mozart's operas. It's not explicit, but just wanted to mention that.
  
  Overall, this was a fairly easy to read biography and I enjoyed that the author included his own commentary and thoughts to the book, giving it more depth!
• 
  Will White

  This is now the third of Jan Swafford's composer biographies that I have read, and I have loved every one of them. Brahms, Beethoven, and now Mozart. (I don't care one whit about Ives, but I have every confidence that Swafford would gave him a superb treatment as well.)
  
  Anyway, the Mozart biography was fantastic. Swafford admits up front that Mozart is not going to follow our pre-ordained romanticized vision of what a composer is supposed to be. He was a child prodigy who was happy to live within the confines of a society dominated by aristocrats and the Catholic church. As an adult, after a somewhat difficult break with his father, he mainly wrote what he wanted and lived in domestic bliss with his wife whom he adored.
  
  But of course, it's not as simple as that, and Swafford is great at teasing out the fascinating details of Mozart's life and context. Not only that, he proves once and for all that when Mozart died, he was on the cusp of a whole new level of productivity and depth in his compositions, and professional success in his life.
  
  Above all, what makes Swafford such a great writer about musicians is that he is a composer himself. He writes about music in a way that makes it come alive and makes the reader rush to their sound system to listen — even to pieces that one has known one's whole life.
  
  I hope that Swafford will continue going backwards through music history and give us biographies of Haydn, the Bach sons, JS himself, Handel and even Purcell.
• 
  Mark

  If you’ve ever wanted to read a book about Mozart, to learn about the man and his music, this is the book. No original research: the author builds his narrative from all the most recent and highest quality secondary sources. The author’s unique contribution is the sensitivity, born of his own compositional work, that he brings to music analysis.
  
  Despite everything I’ve read about Mozart (and I’ve read a lot), I still learned so much from this book: about what different keys meant to Mozart and how he used them; the wonderful music he wrote to play with his friends; and his marvelous late chamber works. Excellent book that I cannot recommend highly enough!
• 
  Theresa

  I finally finished this very long bio, and it was a revelation in many ways, dispelling so many cultural myths. It was easy to read, but might be problematic for non-musicians, as it deals with details of many of his works chronologically with his life events.
• 
  Betty

  First of all ..... this was WAY too long. The audiobook was over 32 HOURS and it sure dragged. If you are looking for a book about the person Mozart I recommend you find another book, because each chapter had only minute details about his life, personality, etc. mainly focusing on the fact that the adult W.A. Mozart never learnt how to handle money!
  If you are looking for a book with the most detailed descriptions of ALL his works (which are obviously many!) than this book is definitely for you.
  I am not a Music major, just a person interested in the life and times of people like Mozart.... I managed to get through this book by sheer willpower. I think that the title of the book should be "The complete Descriptions of all of Mozart's works (with a short look at his life and the times he lived in)".
• 
  David Holoman

  Five stars because I cannot think of a single thing I would change about it. Well maybe one thing.
  
  This book has the annoying characteristic of being so good that the audio version alone won't suffice, you need the hardcopy to refer back to, to check the assertions about how ethereal and moving a particular passage might be, and to occupy a place of honor on a real, not virtual, bookshelf. (This is not the one thing I would change.)
  
  I learned a lot reading this book, things you could argue I should have known, about matters like sonata form and where Mozart sits in relation to peers. I marvel at the freshness that a biography here 250ish years later. Swafford appears to bring unbiased eyes to the record. Also, I do not see any sign of a collaborating translator, so the rendering in English of rhyming tomfoolery, which Mozart wrote a lot of, I guess is some handy wordsmithing by the author, because the source material was not English.
  
  The one thing I would change is NOT the blow by blow (by blow) account Die Zauberflote, although I am sorely tempted. It takes about as much time to read it as it takes to watch the opera.
  
  The one thing I would change is the title, and the closing tie-up-with-a-bow-relating-to-the-title. I think it refers to facts not in evidence. I think the genius just wanted to ply his craft; I think the Greater Motivating Principle is just an imagined reverse construction.
  
• 
  Drew

  An exhaustive yet exciting biography of my favorite composer. This book could be used as a source for a semester-long course on Mozart, it's that dense and that packed with information. It contains history, biography, culture, and a large amount of musicology and composing. This is a huge book and it could have been split into 3 individual ones, but as it stands, it's a great reference book to have if you're interested in the mechanics of one of his concertos, who was his patron when he wrote some sonatas, what his father and sister were like, etc.
  
  I learned a great deal. Some of the cool things were the people whose lives intersected with Mozart, including Joseph & Michael Haydn, Beethoven, Hummel, Johann Christian Bach, and even Goethe. Can you imagine stopping by Mozart's home and seeing Wolfgang, his father Leopold, and Joseph Haydn just sitting around playing violin and viola together, passing the evening away?
  
  A great quote from the book came near the end:

  In the end, much of what sets Mozart apart from Beethoven and those who followed was the amity of his music, the art of a sociable man intended for a circle of friends and for small groups of listeners. That inflected even his monumental last two symphonies, which would become central to how Beethoven conceived the genre. Lonely, deaf, and misanthropic, Beethoven came to address his music to the world at large, to concert halls, to posterity. Beethoven wrote for Humanity, Mozart for people. What we hear in Mozart, even in the last symphonies, is a gift given to us intimately as friend to friend, lover to lover" (p. 732-733)
• 
  Andrew Dockrill

  Such a good book!
  
  There is no argument that Jan Swafford is an extremely talented writer and knows his musicology. I have yet to read his other two books on Brahms and Beethoven, but having just finished Mozart I cannot wait. This book is so in depth taking us from Wolfgang's birth all the way to his death and the journey was like drinking a glass of wine - or whatever your favorite beverage might be. The only parts of the book that I had to slog through a little bit is when he breaks down the meter on which Mozart wrote his operas and piano concherto's in, this was largely meant for those who are well versed in music notation and bars. I found myself after the first few instances of Swafford explaining it, simply skimming it. But this is no fault of Swafford's of course, what else does someone expect when reading about a musical prodigy.
  
  Another thing that was quite nice was that Swafford takes a very nuanced debunking approach to Mozart in that he tries to dispel some of the myths that have come to be attached to his legend since his death. He really makes you stop and think just how unstable trying to make a career for yourself as a musician was in the 18th century. There were no record labels and you had to depend on the relationships you built within the court and hope that you exhibited enough flair when you played that someone might wish to become your patron. But even having found a patron was not necessarily enough as there were many talented musicians within a given city who quite often had their knives out and would be only to eager to sabotage your career. Mozart was certainly a force of nature and really gave me a new respect for his ability and all he had to overcome, and some of the child prodigies of our lifetime - arguably an Elton John for example.
  
  All in all I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Mozart even if you don't possess a strong understanding of musical structure, it doesn't take away from the experience at all, but the rest of the story is very rewarding and Swafford really succeeds in bringing Wolfgang to life. I cannot wait to dive into more of Swafford's work as he has gained himself a new loyal reader.
• 
  William Schram

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an unprecedented prodigy, and his father knew it. "Mozart: The Reign of Love" discusses Mozart's life and work. Author Jan Swafford uses old correspondence and various other sources to piece together Mozart's life.
  
  I first got into Classical Music at the age of 12. At this age, Mozart was already composing music. While Mozart did have the prodding of his father, Leopold, it does make me feel inadequate.
  
  The book discusses Mozart's behaviors and attitudes. It takes into account his personality and ideas. Furthermore, the book describes Mozart as a tireless artist, a creative force of nature, unbound by the strict cultural mores surrounding him.
• 
  Jason Fisk

  Fascinating. Well written. There is a lot of musical information which borders on esoteric. It made me wish I knew a lot more about classical music.
• 
  Ansgar

  Audiobook. 3.5
  Very good in the grand scheme of things. But an irritatingly large amount of music theory.
• 
  Graham Walton

  This is a great book and I have learned so much from it, albeit I do not have a great knowledge of classical music I found it a brilliant read and I have a tremendous empathy for the life that Mozart lead.
• 
  Heather Barkley

  Fantastic! I heard of this when Tyler Cowen recommended it as one of the top books of the year. I trust Tyler's lists, however I thought this one looked intimidating due to the length/cover/general vibe of the book. Instead of buying it for myself I bought it for Christmas for my Mom, a former music teacher. Anyway, I posted the link to Tyler's list on my twitter, my Dad saw it, and he coincidentally also decided to buy my Mom a copy for Christmas. So she had two copies on Christmas Day. I took mine back. At that point, I was like, I might as well read it. I was pleasantly surprised how readable and interesting it was! I took it slow and looked up and lost of the musical works mentioned as I went along, and then made a playlist in chronological order. It has definitely helped me get to know and understand Mozart better. I enjoy when the author gives his explanations of what type of feeling a piece evokes (a couple sipping wine on a spring day, etc.) I was interested the whole time. I am also now wanting to read the author's other books on Brahms and Beethoven. And I am still enjoying my playlist!
• 
  Geni

  Biographical part = 3
  Musicology part = 1
• 
  Joseph

  First of all, I have to admit that Mozart was my favorite composer when I was younger and remains one of my favorite ones today, so a new major biography of Mozart is not something I would miss out on. A while ago, I made it a project to read all of Jan Swafford’s biographies, so I was doubly excited when the impending publication of Mozart: The Reign of Love was announced.
  Since Mozart is one of my favorite composers, I decided to take a leisurely pace through this biography, seeking out additional information on places and historical figures and listening to unfamiliar compositions as I went. Nowadays, the information superhighway provides access to a wealth of online material on figures like Elector Maximilian Theodor of Mannheim and Munich and Elector Maximilian Franz of Bonn, and on the cities of Munich and Bonn themselves. This helps the reader form a clearer picture of Mozart, of the later 18th century, and of the network of familial and professional relationships that connected Mozart and Beethoven, Maximilian Franz and Marie Antoinette. In addition, since youtube.com now has full-length performances of all of Mozart’s operas that I searched for and since the Salzburg Mozarteum has made the New Complete Edition (NMA) of his works available for free online perusal, I was likewise able to develop much clearer sense for the scope of the young Mozart’s achievement in writing eight operas between the ages of 12 and 19. All but the first of these are full-length two and three hour shows, with overture, recitatives, arias, and the rest composed and first conducted by the teenage genius, all in a style that is quite indistinguishable from that of any of the older and more experienced composers of the day. Add to it the rest of the young Mozart’s output of music for the Mass, symphonies, chamber music, and so on, as well as his burgeoning career as a performer on string and keyboard instruments, and the meaning of the words of praise that contemporaries of Mozart as well as his biographers lavish on him becomes much clearer.
  This added considerable enrichment to my reading, even if Swafford, as in earlier biographies, already devotes considerable effort to bringing the times of the composer to life for the reader. He organizes available data into a readily internalizable form and clarifies and provides detail on a wide variety of the relationships in Mozart’s rich professional life. Of primary importance among these would be that between Mozart and the gifted and theatrically connected Weber family, from their first meeting in Mannheim to the composer’s marriage to Constanze in Vienna some years later. It is likewise refreshing to read a biography that devotes sufficient attention to the relationship between Mozart and Josepha Duschek, the muse that inspired some of the composer’s notable concert arias, including the early and delicious “Ah, lo previdi” (a discovery for me) and “Bella mia fiamma,” and whose Prague villa provided the composer with a home away from home when traveling in that city. Swafford also draws attention to the relationship between Mozart, Lorenzo da Ponte, and noted libertine Girolamo Casanova and with the involvement of the latter in the original production of Don Giovanni; Casanova was evidently dissatisfied with some of the libretto and, for himself at least, rewrote parts of it.
  For once in a Swafford biography, I found that the biographer does not present the composer’s father as a figure for veneration. Instead, what the reader gets is a much more thorough picture of the master musician that Leopold Mozart himself undoubtedly was, lucid, gifted, an authoritative writer on the violin and on music in general, and an unsurpassable resonator for his young son’s musical intuitions. Swafford pays considerable attention to Leopold Mozart’s attempts to keep his son on track to Paris and away from Aloysia Weber in 1778 as well as, later on, to keep him homing to Salzburg and Archbishop Colloredo and away from Constanze and Vienna in 1781. Ultimately, it is for the individual reader to judge whether the older Mozart was right or wrong to say what he said, or to what degree he was right or wrong. From my own experience, the nexus of love and career is a delicate one. Even if Mozart might well have, for his own sake, chosen a safer path, “people propose, God disposes.” Keeping an ardent young lover away from the beloved can be like depriving a lioness or a she-bear of her cubs, so that the futility of the attempt becomes evident, destiny takes its course, and the world is enriched by Mozart’s making his way in the capital city of Vienna at a turning point for European (and world) history instead of by his taking up the way of the humble church musician in a provincial if affluent setting, a worthy successor to Johann Sebastian Bach.
  In my opinion, Swafford goes a long way toward presenting the figure of Archbishop Colloredo more fairly than has heretofore been done. The Archbishop, after all, was someone with considerable education and ideological open-mindedness; he also had a job to do and he needed a staff that he could rely on. The misfortune of the time was that people employed to such a person could not just simply quit their job, as Mozart had to apply considerable exertion to do. Here, the name of J. S. Bach again comes to mind, for the earlier composer faced a similar issue with Duke Ernst of Weimar and was obliged to spend a month in prison until he could secure a release from his contract. It is a telling detail that when Mozart died his tragic and untimely death, condolences poured in from all over Europe and not from Salzburg.
  As with previous biographies by Swafford, this one can be error-prone, a characteristic it shares with the Encyclopedia Britannica and Grove’s. When reading, I at first allowed the occasional glitch to pass as a momentary matter or typographical error, and yet after a while I found the number of blips somewhat alarming, so I began to keep track of them. This began on p. 473 of my Kindle edition, where the “Masonic Funeral Music,” K. 477, is referred to as K. 447, a Köchel number belonging to one of the horn concertos. Earlier, on p. 181, Swafford refers to the “exquisite wind fluting” in the aria “Noi donne poverine” in “La finta giardiniera”; this is untenable, as neither the new nor the old complete editions show the participation of wind instruments at this point in that opera; it is possible that Swafford actually refers to the previous aria, “Dentro il mio petto.” I will not take the time or space to proffer the various lapses I happened to stumble upon in the text. If anyone is interested in knowing them, I will gladly share them with them.
  A more serious question of error-proneness arises when one assesses the reputability of the secondary sources that Swafford takes into consideration. Is the biographer, in his zeal to present a lifelike picture of the times, coming to false conclusions in some respects? I, for one, am not in a position to judge, and the truth about certain matters we may never know. I feel much more on solid ground without losing any fascination for the material when Swafford foregrounds documentary evidence that other biographers do not emphasize, such as certain passages from Mozart’s correspondence, or else draws attention to newly-discovered or little-known data, such as the extant correspondence between Leopold Mozart and Countess Waldstätten.
  Therefore, I find before me a compelling, engagingly-written biography of a master composer who is frequently misunderstood if often touted. As a way of fleshing out the life and times of the later 18th century, as a summary of recent research on Mozart, as a fresh viewpoint on the composer’s work, I find this biography invaluable. As a first Mozart biography for any reader, it will do finely; however, for that purpose some may prefer Stanley Sadie’s “Mozart: The Early Years” or the works of Robbins-Landon, if only for their relative objectivity of tone, even if additional data concerning the life of Mozart may have surfaced since those other works were written.
  
• 
  Bookreporter.com Biography & Memoir

  As I closed the back cover of MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE, wishing incredibly that it might go on just a little longer than its 800-and-some pages, I suddenly realized that the hero of Jan Swafford’s amazing biography was just half my age when he died on December 5, 1791.
  
  Had Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived beyond 35, a point at which the world already recognized him to have “arrived” as a consummate composing and performing artist, what further marvels might he have accomplished? Anyone who has written about this 18th-century child prodigy-turned-musical superhero has asked the same question in various forms, usually accompanied by far too much lament and baseless speculation.
  
  Like his precursors from the early 19th century to the past decade, Swafford also could have milked the hypothetical “future Mozart” idea, but gives it an elegant pass every time it comes up. And thank goodness for that. There was simply so much packed into the short life Mozart actually led --- easily the equivalent of half-a-dozen hard-working musicians from any era.
  
  Instead of hypothesizing, or further mythologizing a life whose true facts are far more interesting than popular fiction, Swafford dug deep into every conceivable fragment and tidbit of the Mozart family’s life and times, along with those of their friends, relatives, employers, rulers and influencers.
  
  But what makes MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE yet another milestone in Swafford's series of substantial composer biographies (Charles Ives, 1996; Johannes Brahms, 1997; Ludwig van Beethoven, 2014), of which the shortest exceeds 500 pages, is his unique fusion of raw data with truthful storytelling and thoughtful extrapolation. Orchestrating words and themes as deftly as any of the composers he so vividly has revealed to date (who will be next, we wonder?), Swafford transforms a deluge of available information into imaginative yet fact-based contexts that reveal Mozart’s talent in a down-to-earth and memorably human way.
  
  While keeping to a broad chronological structure, Swafford creates a very real-time environment in which multiple events --- domestic, personal, artistic, political, historical --- continually collide and interweave. That's life happening. Mozart was no solitary genius, in fact quite the opposite. His life was simultaneously lived in the moment and at great depth. The book’s many detours into the affairs of his bossy father Leopold, submissive but practical mother Maria Anna, and talented but suppressed older sister Nannerl, as well as the comings and goings of numerous friends, colleagues, rivals and aristocratic employers, all reflect many facets of themselves and the prodigious talent at the center of this musical vortex.
  
  Interspersed among segments of the composer’s life, MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE includes numerous portrayals of individual works. To keep his biography less technical but still substantial enough to reach every level of music lover, Swafford completely dispensed with illustrative score fragments and chose the higher, far more difficult road (for the writer, not the reader) of intimately describing the mood, tonal color and structure of many celebrated pieces.
  
  In deft, empathic and knowledgeable prose, he treats a piano concerto here, an aria there, a string quartet or opera scene somewhere else, as lovingly as one might describe a dear friend: all as unique “personalities,” entirely formed within the reader’s receptive imagination. This is the great paradox of writing about music, which truly lives when being played and heard, yet whose individual notes last only as long as the vibrations of air will allow. Even Mozart’s voluminous scores were silent road maps, revealing his art only to those able to decipher and animate their particular language.
  
  One of the biggest surprises to 21st-century readers with a reverence for history and its artifacts is just how ephemeral music could be in Mozart’s day, when score-copying was done entirely by hand and print publication was often too costly to invest in. Original manuscripts circulated among friends and working colleagues; some were cared for and returned to their creators, others pirated and appropriated under false names, still others lost or discarded.
  
  Mozart wasn’t the only late-18th-century composer accustomed to dashing off chamber music, symphonies, cantatas and the like for single-use occasions, or at the most for a brief series of performances. At the time, last week’s scores were usually ignored like last week’s news. As Swafford reiterates a number of times, Mozart was always looking ahead to the next commissioned piece and typically had several scores on the go. In the end, although the disease or condition that killed him so young was never firmly established, Swafford sensibly suggests that it was a combination of prolonged overwork and incompetent doctors. Ironically, the next generation of composers and doctors heralded a different society, one in which the training and artifacts of both professions vastly increased in respect and value.
  
  While it’s impossible to do justice to the sheer size and skilled density of MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE in the space of a single review, one can’t leave out another area in which Swafford excels in the art of reassessing the composer’s remarkable life. That was the women in it.
  
  Instead of being ushered into the shadows of history, they are portrayed honestly and generously through their talents, intelligence, bravery, cunning, endurance and character. Whether in Vienna, Salzburg, Prague, Berlin, Paris or any number of European musical centers, it was no easy road for women to survive and excel as independent solo instrumental performers, professional singers, business managers, conductors, patrons, impresarios, musicians’ wives or mothers. Most notably, Swafford fleshes out Mozart’s stoic, opinionated and sensible wife Constanze, who would live well into the 19th century and revive a youthful singing career after her illustrious husband’s death.
  
  Many readers will come to MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE with an enviable recognition of his many groundbreaking scores by name or catalogue number and perhaps imaginatively hear them while reading. But for the rest of us, who need to run to our recorded libraries after every chapter, the rewards of this unsurpassed Mozart biography will be just as delicious.
  
  Reviewed by Pauline Finch
• 
  Anthony

  Reading Jan Swafford's popular biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms reminds me of coasting on a bicycle down a gently graded hill. (As the author probably knows, nobody cares about his fourth subject, Charles Ives.) Hardly any effort is required, but the reader is at liberty to add some of his own exertion to the exercise. He benefits thereby from nature's friendly slope and from what he contributes. Mozart: The Reign of Love fits well into this mold.
  
  The book could not seem to decide whether scrupulously to avoid the clichéd psychospeculation that poisons biography in general, and biography of a select number of composers in particular (most famously Maynard Solomon's Mozart: A Life, which could have been dedicated to Dr. Freud). Swafford was often at great pains not to do this, yet could not resist a bit of rosy meaninglessness to end his last chapter:
  
  The quintessential artist, Mozart served the great human simplicities and shaped his great lies to show us the truth. From childhood, music was his native language and his mode of being. He thought deeply but in tones, felt mainly in tones, loved in tones, and steeped himself in the worlds he was creating with tones. From a life made of music he wove his music into the fabric of our lives. More and more toward the end, as he reached toward new territories, his art found a consecrated beauty that rose from love: love of music, love of his wife, love of humanity in all its gnarled splendor, love of the eternal yearning for God in the human heart. His work served all that. Whatever his image of God by the time he reached the Requiem, it was taken up in his humanity, and his humanity was for all time, and it was exalted in his art. (733)
  
  It puts one off to be, on the one hand, repeatedly told to take secondhand accounts of Mozart with a grain of salt (e.g., "One of the stories, all of them possible, none of them certain, says that . . ." [727]), and on the other, to be offered obvious opinion as fact. And not just any opinion, but opinion on which there is no reasonable or productive argument. (Who would take the time to deny that Mozart "felt mainly in tones"?)
  
  The book swells with lengthy descriptions of the plots of Mozart's operas. Given that Mozart wrote the texts for exactly none of them, I considered this a minor misstep. (Another reviewer wryly comments that the book in general suffers from "too many notes" – the same criticism some of Mozart's music received in its day. I disagree, but cute point.) Not unrelatedly, I will never think it appropriate to parenthesize the death of an infant as Swafford did (601). In fairness, Swafford did this to prove a point – that babies in that time were expected to die early, so a death would not have had the same effect on parents then as it would today – but I was not satisfied that he carried his burden. I felt that Swafford missed opportunities both to add social context and to elaborate on the Mozart family's reaction to traumas such as these.
  
  Nevertheless, we are richer for Swafford's clear prose and his works' dogged aim to prove that our great composers were human beings. At this, he continues to succeed.
• 
  Caroline

  This giant new book about Mozart served as a break for me from things that make me sad or worried. I hadn't ever spent much time reading about Mozart, for whatever reason, but I saw 'Amadeus.' It turns out that is not a very good representation of Mozart, his life, or even his relations with Salieri.
  
  In the introduction, Swafford quotes a pianist as telling him, "We tend to listen to Mozart with ears trained by Beethoven, and that's not the best way to listen to Mozart." It was not until the 19th century that composers were supposed to be writing to express their own personal joys and sorrows. In Mozart's day composers wrote what they could sell, and if they wrote something stormy it was partly in service of the personality they assigned to the particular key they'd selected, or the skills of the musicians they knew would be playing the work. This is a very useful corrective to all the baloney about Mozart being impoverished, afraid of death, or in other ways miserable as he neared the end of his very short life. It even turns out that after decades of rivalry, he and Salieri were ultimately friends.
  
  Mozart definitely had a silly and sometimes smutty side, which he apparently took from his mother, and he never learned to manage the money that would flow through his hands because hid father basically took all the earnings from the tours Wolfgang and Nannerl played as children and stashed them away, crying poverty to his son for the rest of his life and demanding the son support him more than he was. Ultimately he disinherited Mozart and gave all that hidden money to Nannerl who grudgingly gave Wolfgang about 10% of it. Leopold does not come across as a very attractive character.
  
  After awhile I began to skim the descriptions of the actual music unless it was a piece I already knew, because as Swafford says in the beginning he has to try to describe the music but it's nearly impossible. He's right. Unless you go listen a little or know the piece already, the descriptions will tell you not much. I know why he did this, but it does become a little tedious.
  
  The writing about the operas focuses on how important characterization was to Mozart, and how even when given a less than perfect libretto he worked hard to convey character through music and sometimes took a more active role in the libretto to improve the story.
  
  Overall, it seems Mozart was a cheerful, happy, uxorius, and incredibly hard-working guy until he finally took to his bed and never got up. No tragedy here, unless you count the incredible loss to the world of another 30 years or more of whatever he would have gotten up to.
• 
  Eric

  I had a forthcoming car trip of 10+ hours each way, and this audiobook proved to be a wonderful traveling companion! I have sung Mozart on many occasions and many different types of his music - sacred, opera, etc. And like most music lovers I recall, what was then, the epic movie Amadeus. Yet this new book by Swafford reveals a depth to Mozart I had never imagined. And it also corrected some of the false images and rumors perpetuated by the epic movie.
  
  The book begins on the premise of using the large collection of his extant letters to retell his life and story. Early in the book there seemed to be many more letters to draw from - those with his father, his sister, etc. It also develops how his father, Leopold, sought to develop the career of his protege son. It also reveals how the father kept most of the money Mozart generated for himself, never giving Wolfgang his due, claiming continued financial struggle, and thus never allowing him to develop a wise understanding and use of money - which will plague him for the rest of his life.
  
  As the story of Mozart's career is told, Swafford gives many examples of what Mozart was doing in his private life and his artistic development. If one was reading this book and had access to YouTube, it would be fascinating to listen to the examples mentioned to hear that which is being discussed. All pieces of music are referenced with their Kochel # for easy research. Swafford also discusses that, early in adulthood, Mozart would become a member of the Masonic Order; this would influence his life and music in the years to come - especially as the understand of Masonry is later portrayed in the story of Zauberflote. At the end of the book, when Mozart was really hitting his stride independent of his father, the number of letters cited begins to decrease. At the same time, the author begins to go into more lengthy detail and explanation about Mozart's works - especially his last five operas for which he is most well known - Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan Tutti, La clemenza di Tito, and Zie Zauberflote. The book then concludes with an in depth discussion of his Requiem - dispelling some of the persistent false rumors about its inspiration for composition as presented in the Amadeus movie.
  
  This book instilled in me a much deeper understanding and appreciation of Mozart - his life, his challenges, his music, his relationships. Any music fan, especially a Mozart fan, will enjoy this book. Highly recommended!
• 
  Fraser Kinnear

  The Romantics would care mainly about Mozart’s darker moods, and would brush aside his sunny ones as merely pleasant. But Mozart’s bright outings are not necessarily less ambitious or less weighty than the proto-Romantic ones. Only in art is suffering called more interesting and worthwhile than good times. No artist made more of pleasure, made it deeper, more liberated, more sensual, than Mozart did.

  
  Not only in art do we seem to prefer suffering, but also biography! I adored Swafford’s biography of Beethoven, and suspect I was less interested in his Mozart effort simply due to Beethoven having the more dramatic life.
  
  One asset both books come with is a fantastic series of recommendations for further listening, and brief synopses of interesting works. I left with a great long playlist of Mozart pieces, which was half my motivation (K.219, K.331, K.387, K.415, K.452, K.465, K.466, K.492, K.516, K.527, K.543, K.545, K.550, K.595, K.618, K.622,K.626). Interestingly, Swafford doesn’t really engage on specific works until you get into the 400’s, which is several decades into Mozart’s career.
  
  Mozart the character may not have led quite as stormy a life as Beethoven, but Swafford was able to relish in some very eccentric behaviors for this composer. In particular, Mozart had a famous blue streak, and Swafford delights in jerking the reader from waxing rhapsodic over Ave Verum Corpus to sharing the letter Mozart sent following the composition:
  

  Choirmaster Stoll premiered Ave Verum Corpus at the St. Stephan Parish Church in Baden on June 23. Mozart had for this friend no particular sublime feelings, as shown in the opening doggerel of a letter he wrote to him in July:
  

  Dearest Stoll,
  Good old troll. You sit in your hole, drunk as a mole. But you’re touched in your soul by music’s sweet flow.

  
  … on the opposite side of the letter, he scrawled in an imitation of his student’s handwriting “Don’t let us down, or we’ll be sitting in scheisse!

  
  Recommended!
  
• 
  K

  Here and later, when life slapped him down, as happened to him like everybody else, he never said, "I am Mozart! They can't do this to me!" Instead, he said the quivalent of "This is what happened, and this is what I am going to do to fix it."

  
  
  I don't feel that the book necessarily delivered on what I expected: a biography of Mozart's life outside of his music, but I think the book proves the point that Mozart did not really have a life outside of music; the entirety of his life was entangled with it.
  Interesting as some parts were, I got tired of this book because there was a lot more about specific music and historical context than there actually was about Mozart's life and what was happening in it while he wrote the music. The author would be like, "Mozart had bad things coming" in the midst of a deep analysis of an opera. I guess I'm not really the intended audience of this book because even though the author's musical analysis is great I got bored and just skimmed all of it to read about what was going on in his life. Thankfully the author's writing is very clear and accessible. I just don't think there was a lot of original biographical content; either it was musical analysis, historical context, or block quotes of letter excerpts/other publications. While I also appreciate historical context, I think there was more of that than the author's words about Mozart's life. I feel like if the author didn't analyze so intensely this book might've been better, but from my perspective, as far as the author is concerned, a biography about Mozart is really a biography of his compositions. I think the beginning of the book was better when it talked about his father and sister and his relationships with them. Although a lot of that was through letters that they wrote and not the author. And I didn't feel the italicized/fictional dialogues served any particular purpose because they are fiction and this book is a nonfiction.
  But in general I am grateful that there is this biography here because I did learn from it and also I appreciate the author's effort to getting rid of the myths surrounding Mozart's life and legacy.
• 
  MaryFrances Ronan

  Wow, this author deserves 5 stars, but you'll really have to persevere and slog through it because it is 1) very long, and 2)half musical discussions of everything Mozart ever wrote (meaning, more than you want to know). A musical analysis involves telling you everything about the music. What the form is like, who was going to be performing it, what keys it started out in for the first theme, what key it changed into for the second theme, how the development section was managed, and more. In the case of Figaro he devotes an entire chapter, including detailed discussions of all the characters and the typically ridiculous operatic plot. Since I am only familiar with a very few of Mozart's most famous pieces, it was really hard reading the analysis of something I had never heard. Well, for that matter, it is hard to read an analysis even if you have heard it! As far as biography goes, it is excellent. I was surprised to learn that Mozart loved writing scatological letters to his friends and loved talking dirty. He was supremely endowed by God, or so it seemed, with endless beautiful melodies that he could pull out and write down at will. He lived always on the edge of his income and even though he was earning a very good income most of the time he was always in debt and borrowing from friends. That was partly because he enjoyed wearing the most expensive and fashionable clothes, and he freely spent money at billiards and cards. The author claims he did not die a pauper or get buried in a "pauper's grave" as the popular myth holds. He says Emperor Joseph II had decreed that bodies be taken outside the city and dropped in the ground without a coffin and that affected Mozart's demise. Hang in there...you'll learn a lot!