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Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces
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About This Book
In exhilarating, transformative prose, the poet Patrick Mackie reveals a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive. Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand about his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer? Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer's life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship. In Mozart in Motion , we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart's music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being.
Reviews
"Mackie's assertions about the ways Mozart's identification with his era come through in the music are intriguing and insightful, even when overly sweeping and, at times, too speculative ..."
"An intriguing blend of biography and deft musical analysis ..."
"While the book makes it easy to follow the arc of Mozart's life and to appreciate his personality, this is not a conventional biography ..."
"The connections he draws are always thought-provoking even when they rely on conjecture ..."
"I wasn't always convinced by Mackie's claims, or always able to hear exactly what he describes ..."
"Mackie gives relatively short shrift to such major achievements as the minor-mode piano concertos and the world-embracing late string quintets ..."
"Mackie takes us inside the salon environment for Mozart's three great piano sonatas of 1784, where his sensitivity to Mozart's mood is remarkable ..."
"A unique, wide-ranging study ..."
"And his writing style is perhaps more ornate and erudite than readers who are looking for a casual introduction into the composer's life are looking for."
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