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Title: Mozart: A Life (A Penguin Life)
ISBN: 0143037730
Author:
Peter Gay
Publicate Date: 2006-08-29
Publish: 2006-08-29
List Price: $13.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $2.00
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1: A Short Biography of a Genius
Peter Gay's book on Mozart is truly utilitarian, just a short book with all the facts and a few minor clarifications on the folklore surrounding Mozart. The author follows his subject chronologically, with a special emphasis on the familial relationships and Mozart's unusual correspondence.
Gay suggests that Mozart's achievements as a child prodigee may have been partly the work of an ambitious father. Gay also puts to rest the enduring rumours that Mozart was poisoned, murdered by a patron, or buried in a pauper's grave. None of these actually happened, despite what we have seen on the silver screen the last 30 years.
The book is well written, Gay is an entertaining and thorough author, but dont expect anything really new or controversial here.
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2: A Two-Dimensional Mozart
Somewhere between Maynard Solomon's 650-page opus Mozart: A Life and the Mozart write-up on Wikipedia, there is Mozart by Peter Gay.
Mozart's story should lend itself to the Penguin Lives series of short biographies. It was a remarkable life in spite of its brevity. Mozart gifted the biographer with a voluminous correspondence and Gay makes extensive use of it. If it sometimes seems as if the narrative consists of epistolary excerpts strung together, they do communicate some aspects of Mozart's character, particularly as regards the increasingly difficult father-son relationship.
Gay also enjoys quoting the vulgar witticisms that frequently occur in the correspondence. Peter Gay is also the author of a biography of Sigmund Freud, so the character analysis was perhaps bound to take a psychoanalytic turn. For example, vis-??-vis the penchant for vulgarity, Mozart "yielded more readily than many others to the regressive pull of early fixations." His adolescent attraction to Aloysia Weber was the expression of "agreeable rescue fantasies". It's hard to say what, if anything, these observations add to the reader's insight into Mozart the man. In the end, while we learn the important facts about Mozart's life, we don't really get a clear sense of character from this book.
Not to say that the author fails to recognize and carry out his writerly duties. In a biography of Mozart, or of any famous person, the author is required to engage with the standard mythology, and Gay dutifully sets the record straight. Mozart was in fact dismissed from the Archbishop of Salzburg's service with a kick in the rear end, and he did once write a full symphony in four days (No. 36). He was not, however, poisoned to death by Salieri (rheumatic fever was the culprit) and he was not just taking straight dictation from God - his original manuscripts bear much evidence of rewriting and revision. (Unfortunately, Gay does not address the implicit charge of alcoholism in the film "Amadeus".) As far as Mozart's famous arrogance, Gay's account perhaps affords an improved perspective: "He had no false modesty about his gifts; since they were God-given, it would be sacrilegious, he thought, to make light of them."
To a great extent the story of Mozart's life is the story of his musical compositions. He began to compose in early childhood; by his death in 1791 the corpus had grown to some 600 works - among them, of course, a number of the signal works of the classical era. Gay cites most of the appropriate pieces - the "Turkish" violin concerto, composed at 19; the piano concertos; the great late symphonies including the No. 41 "Jupiter"; the Requiem Mass. Others could have been mentioned, some excluded; it's pointless to quibble. The important thing is that our author should write well about them.
Unfortunately, Gay isn't very good at writing about music. His musical discussions tend to lapse into praise rather than interpretation: "To experience [the late symphonies] is to enjoy a spectacle of energy translated into beauty." He finally throws up his hands: "...how puerile these common metaphors are compared to the experience of *listening* to Mozart!"
The musical analysis we do get generally comes in the form of quotations from other people - established critics and scholars like Alfred Einstein and Charles Rosen. These, along with the bibliographical essay, are helpful for those seeking more substantive discussion.
Character analysis and musicology aside, what we really want from a Mozart essay by Peter Gay is a discussion of the composer's place in the great intellectual movement of his time: the Enlightenment. Gay is the author of a magisterial two-volume survey of the Enlightenment which runs to some 1,650 pages and is considered definitive. So we make our way through the present narrative patiently waiting for the part where Gay reveals his expert insights into Mozart's role in the Age of Reason. In vain. The benefits to Mozart of Emperor Joseph II's reformist policies are briefly acknowledged. Hope glimmers with Mozart's induction into Freemasonry, but Gay pretty much dismisses this as a networking maneuver. The Magic Flute is characterized as "a rationalist Mason's celebration of truth, love, and human warmth", but the analysis goes no further. If the Penguin Enlightenment Reader is correct on the matter, The Magic Flute's libretto "distills the essence of the Enlightenment"; so it's particularly disappointing that Gay has nothing much to say about it here.
Come to think of it, it's hard to say what advantages Gay's book really has over the Wikipedia essay. After all, they offer substantially the same information; Wikipedia includes color pictures of the composer, his family, and his native Salzburg; you can click to hear the musical pieces discussed; and you can save $[...] to spend on something else. Like some music by Mozart, for example.
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3: Mozart's Life: Lite yet Substantial
Peter Gay's `Mozart' is the sort of book a heavy-hitting historian like Gay writes while on holiday at the beach. Lite, witty and short, but still substantial enough to satisfy. (The same could be said for many of the excellent volumes of the Penguin Lives series--alas, now defunct.)
As nearly every other reviewer has pointed out, this slim volume treats Mozart's correspondingly brief life with Gay's celebrated prose style. No new details are introduced, at least nothing destined to alter Mozart scholarship (for all the details, you'll want the much longer `Mozart: A Life' by Maynard Solomon). What Gay brings to Mozart's life is readability, historical context (this is PETER GAY, after all) and a nice quick summary for those readers who have an interest in Mozart but may not care to spend more than a few hours studying him.
One nice advantage of the book, especially for those looking to gain a better understanding of Mozart's music, is that Gay connects the events of Mozart's life to the production of some of his musical masterpieces. With Gay's book and iTunes, you can quickly build a "best of" Mozart library as you read along.
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4: Bravo Peter Gay
It takes one genius to write about another genius.
Peter Gay is so very well respected for his insites and work for many years. He tackles the complex life and mind of Mozart with eloquence and with a prose that is engaging and fluid.
I think I am off to listen to my old records of Mozart.
Exceptional read, that captivates the reader.
Love The Written Word
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5: A good short life -but does not explain the miracle and mystery
Commissioned by James Atlas as part of the 'Penguin Biography ' series this short biography of Mozart by historian Peter Gay is balanced, transparent and clear. In other words it partakes of some of the Classical qualities which so distinguished Mozart's work. And this when one of Gay's major points is to stress that Mozart's dark side was a very great part of his music. Gay traces the story of the child prodigy who unlike most child prodigies continued his complex development throughout his working life, creating in the course of this a vast body of work at the highest level in all the musical genres of the time. Two of his friends Johann Christian Bach and the great Haydn helped him on his way. Haydn told Mozart's proud, overbearing, pushy father,"Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name: He has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition."
Gay dispels a number of popular myths including the one which is the basis of the film 'Amadeus' that Salieri poisoned Mozart. He makes use of his psychoanalytic training to explain the relationship between Mozart father and Mozart son. He dispels the myth of Mozart's abject poverty and rejection. He provides a very readable narrative of the lives of one of mankind's great God - gifted geniuses.
But he also does not do what I had hoped he would i.e come close to revealing the secret or secrets of Mozart's genius. So many others have written music and so many others at the same time were writing music. Reams and reams of it. What gave Mozart the ability to do this on a level beyond the others? And what in the music itself is so beyond the others? Words like 'lightness' and ' complexity' and 'depth' and 'lyricism' and 'fluency' and 'powerful feeling' and 'emotive expressionism' and ....All the words do not say it.
I would have liked to have read more about what we 'hear' in Mozart that we can hear nowhere else.
Gay does a good job telling the life, and especially I think the relationship between father Leopold and the much- demanded- of genius son. But he does not, and perhaps no one can, tell us the real secret of why this musician and this music have been for so many, of another realm entirely.
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