A biographical trio marks Mozart anniversary

REVIEWS BY MICHAEL ALEC ROSE

For lovers of Mozart's music, milestones like the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth signal a season of special delight, when concerts, new recordings and fresh publications in honor of dear Wolfgang Amadeus abound. The steady stream of Mozartiana in 2006 offers something for everyone, making the celebration of his birth (on January 27, 1756) all the more joyful. Three new biographies of Mozart exemplify the exciting variety of approaches to the man and his music available to fans both old and new.

Wunderkind

The late Stanley Sadie, the most distinguished musicologist of his generation, completed the first of a projected two-volume biography of Mozart not long before he died. With his comprehensive—even startling—command of every detail from Mozart's life and every phrase from his music, Professor Sadie provides a blessed antidote to the accumulation of rank myth and imprudent speculation generally surrounding the early years of Mozart. Such irresponsible biography is not hard to account for, in light of the mystique of the boy prodigy. In Mozart: The Early Years, Sadie deftly shows how needless that sort of tale-spinning is, by uncovering instead the limitless interest of the facts themselves. It is a sad loss that he could not finish his second volume, on Mozart's final decade in Vienna.


Women in music

Author Jane Glover is a conductor who specializes in Mozart, performing his works all over the globe. With her practical and complex grasp of his musical style, she has both the skill and the grace to extend her treatment of Mozart's Women: The Man, The Music, and The Loves in His Life beyond the strict bounds of biography into the realm of Mozart's musical imagination. Glover begins her book with a lively account of Mozart's "two families" (his own and his wife's), paying particular attention to the composer's dependence on and high regard for the women in his life. These "real-life" sections set the stage for the final act of her book, where Glover, with insinuating (i.e., Mozartian!) high spirits, reveals just how thoroughly Mozart "lived" with the female characters he created for the operatic stage. An outstanding example is Glover's extended treatment of Susanna, the heroine of The Marriage of Figaro: these pages of the book flow like an aria in prose, a song of praise to Mozart's finest dramatic creation, a woman whose wit and joie de vivre present the clearest possible reflection of the composer's own humaneness.


The complete works

The last "movement" in our trio of new books approaches the genius of Mozart most closely. Julian Rushton's Mozart arrives as the latest entry in the "Master Musicians" series from Oxford University Press (edited by Stanley Sadie!), but this set of volumes could just as accurately have been named "The Master Biographers." Rushton has pulled off something as brilliant as it is implausible: a perfectly judicious account of the life of the composer, informed by the latest historical research, wedded to an array of original insights into Mozart's music, genre by genre, piece by piece, detail by breathtaking detail—and all this in less than 300 pages of scintillating text and spot-on musical examples. Rushton is the ideal cicerone to Mozart's music, trusting (as Mozart himself does) our intelligence and fellow feeling, moving from one idea to the next with unfailing good sense and humor. In a thrilling chapter called "The Land of the Clavier," Rushton asks how the solo piano of a Mozart concerto can "impose itself on such a plethora of ideas." The wonder-struck reader of Rushton's book may well find herself asking the very same question about the author.

As long as music exists, there will always be a company of individuals—a sort of Masonic fellowship of Mozart—to whom this composer's works are as nourishing as spring rain, as indispensable as breath, as mysterious as love. To those fortunate Mozartians, a 250th birthday celebration, with all its glamour, is purely redundant, for every day of living with Mozart's miraculous music is a festival, every note of it an immeasurable gift.


Michael Alec Rose is a composer and professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches a course on Mozart.

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