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Mozart: The Reign of Love
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About This Book
From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart's singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life's tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford's biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it's nearly impossible to understand classical music's origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.
Reviews
"An admiring, authoritative biography."
"Likewise, Swafford does not upend our vision of the composer, although he quashes myths with clear-sighted good sense."
"He also makes good use of a vast trove of letters written by Mozart, his family members, and many others."
"It is a great pleasure to read about Mozart as a working composer in a narrative written by a working composer ..."
"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 ..."
"Swafford paints a revelatory portrait of the man, his music, and his times ..."
"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."
"Mr Swafford, himself a composer and a programme-writer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, offers an updated, accessible and authoritative life, beautifully written and full of astute critical judgments and incisive notes on the works."
"He is thoroughly up-to-date on the latest information and controversies, debunking the still commonly held mythology about the composer, and he continually reminds us of what astounding music Mozart wrote ..."
"and, as a composer himself, offering an astute yet thoroughly approachable analysis, almost piece by piece, of the composer's entire canon, lingering fittingly on the composer's major operas."
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