Mozart: A Life

This is a short, brief, to-the-point book about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which, for all its brevity, is probably the only book a general reader would want to consult to be fully informed of his life and work. In addition, if you are like me, your only source of information about the life of Mozart is the great movie and stage play, "Amadeus." If that is the case, as the Firesign Theater says, "Everything you know is wrong." Johnson's book does much to dispel just about every factual assertion indicated in that movie. For example, * There was no murderous rivalry between Mozart and Salieri. Johnson calls this slander. Leopold, Mozart's father, probably distrusted Salieri more than Mozart himself, who was on good terms with Salieri. * Further, the "Mysterious Stranger" who commissioned Mozart to write the Requiem was not Salieri. History has definitively identified another person. * Salieri did NOT assist the dying Mozart in completing the Requiem. * Constanze, Mozart's wife, was not some fluzzy, but an accomplished, respected soprano singer herself. While she was not, as indicated in the film, his de-facto manager in his life, she was an able administrator of his estate on death. * Mozart was not a flake constantly in debt. While he did ask for money many, many times, in his life, Johnson attributes this to the primitive condition of the public banking system, where public cash was in short supply. The equivalent to modern loans was friends lending other friends money. Loans which were made in his life were paid on a timely basis, and on his death Constanze paid his outstanding loans quickly from his estate. * The movie implied that Mozart's burial in a common grave was the equivalent to that of a pauper. Instead, Johnson indicates that this was a common practice. There are some things the movie got right: * By all indications the film accurately reflects Mozart's father and his conflict with Constanze. * Mozart's conflict with Bishop Colloredo appears to be accurate. * Mozart apparently enjoyed billiards very much in his life. * He was, as is implied in the movie, a music writing machine. The extent to which Johnson lists his many compositions in his short life is staggering. The point is made in the movie where Salieri bemoans that the manuscripts to his compositions appear to be written in dictation. Johnson does not directly dispel this observation. For the decade before his death, Mozart and Hayden, who worked together, wrote a masterpiece every two-weeks, Mozart producing twice as much as Hayden. For its purposes this is a one-stop book about Mozart. It is as much a discussion of Mozart's work as well as an exposition of his life. Anyone wanting a detailed discussion may read Solomon's extensive, excellent biography on Mozart. For the general reader, Johnson's book is all you will need to know.

I recently visited Salzburg and Vienna, attended some concerts there and visited the Mozart House museum. Although I have always admired Mozart's music, I became interested in knowing more about the man, the composer, the son and husband. This book fit the bill very well. I learned about the man's character and disposition, his passions, and mode of operation. Even more, I took notes about his musical works -- those I want to listen to and those I want to study further.

Please, do yourself a favor and buy this book. 155 pages of pure joy. Paul Johnson does real justice with my favorite composer and musician - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart never came a live more brilliantly, his wonderful personality shines out through the pages. The writing is beautiful, Johnson made a remarkable musical and historical research and the result is wonderful. Spills out light on Mozart life, personality and music - a true must for every Mozart lover.

I am a fan of Paul Johnson but this is not by any means his best effort. It is a skeletal biography -- with about as much information as you can find in Wikipedia -- used as framework for Johnson's opinions about Mozart's music. The issues, controversies and myths about Mozart's life -- what was his relationship with his father, for example, or what was his wife like -- are addressed in passing or with conclusory statements of Johnson's opinions. (The one exception is his discussion of whether Mozart lived in poverty which, whether right or wrong, it does at least depend as much on fact as on opinion.) Johnson's style is generally clear. His tendency to count and number things, though, can be tedious. He often tells us how many examples of each type and sub-type of musical composition Mozart created; this is a feature of exhaustive musical analyses but has no real place here, where there is rarely a point to be made by it. And announcing that there are ten reasons why a certain thing is true and then plodding through them all is not a formula for engaging prose. As for the useless, vain autobiographical details, they are perhaps more the fault of contemporary publishing-industry requirements than of Johnson. But I didn't buy this book to learn what Paul Johnson did in boarding school, nor where he bought a reference work he used to write this book, nor what restaurant he would eat at when he finished it. Johnson clearly loves Mozart and his music. But if you want musicological analysis, do what he did and read musicologists. Johnson favors Tovey; a number of Tovey's works are available on Amazon. If you want biography, WIkipedia is more thorough than many of the books now available. (Solomon, the most recent major biography, is a very detailed and astonishingly dull Freudian analysis.)

Johnson has written many concise biographies of famous people (Socrates, Churchill, Eisenhower) and this accounting of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of his best. Of course, he has an extremely interesting character to write about. Mozart was a prodigy at an early age; his musician father carted him throughout Europe showing off his works. He had performed before kings and queens throughout the Continent before he was ten years old. A native of Salzburg, he learned to speak Latin and English and picked up mathematics easily. By his teens, he was considered the equal of any composer alive (or dead). I am not a big fan of classical music and I do not know much about the great composers, but this compact book proved to be a fascinating account of a great genius. Some of Johnson's more esoteric observations flew over my head but for the most part I could follow his reasoning. Mozart died at the age of 35 of liver disease. I intended to list all of the musical compositions that Mozart produced, but the list on page 4 of the book is literally too lengthy to reproduce here. Mozart was a prolific genius who mastered every instrument except the harp and produced operas, masses, songs, ballet music, arias, symphonies, concertos, dances, and many other works. "He played and composed as he breathed," writes Johnson, with fluidity, speed, and accuracy. Mozart was also a joker, incorporating many musical jokes into his works, some that probably still remain hidden even to this day. Mozart loved to dance and he wrote a lot of dance music. His one great passion, other than music, was billiards. He would compose while waiting his turn to play, fidgeting with billiard balls in hand. "Mozart had a fetish about smooth, rolling objects." He liked to handle billiard balls while thinking and creating. Mozart could be touchy and edgy, but people enjoyed him for his love of life. "Gay himself by nature," Johnson writes, "he saw no reason why people should not enjoy a little innocent pleasure, or not-so-innocent pleasure, for that matter." I was caught by one catch-phrase buried inside a chapter--"Mozart's beauty prevents one from appreciating his power." One could be excused for believing that W.A. Mozart was a gift to mankind from God.

This was an easy to read biography, good for someone like me coming to the subject knowing nothing about it other than the old movie "Amadeus." Pros: not too long, and provided a less extreme p.o.v. on his debts, and his family life. Clearly Johnson did some serious listening to the oeuvre, also. Con: sometimes it read like a list of the "K-numbers." I wish there'd been some sort of schematic of the works for someone like me wanting to become more familiar with M.ozart's enormous output.

Paul Johnson's book on "Mozart, A Life" is the latest addition to my collection of books on Mozart. Everything about it is well done, from the attractive design of the book jacket (which I scanned and made into a poster) to the pages on "Further Reading" at the end. Paul Johnson writes well. His narrative flows with an economy of words, is insightful, and a joy to read. I place it alongside my other best book on Mozart, "Mozart, His Character, His Work", by Alfred Einstein.

It's refreshing to read a biography of Mozart that treats him as an adult human being. Johnson makes no excuses for Mozart's life and does not great his subject as it he's made of "Dresden china"; instead he gives us the life of a true genius and doesn't why away or avert his eyes when there are rough patches or ugly parts. He doesn't why away from Mozart's money troubles in his last years, however, he explains how these problems were not unique to Mozart, nor does he blame Frau Mozart for the cash flow problems. An all around good general biography, I also highly recommend Mozart at the Gateway to his Fortune by Christoph Wolff. Both that work and this do much to dispel the fiction of the play "Mozart & Salieri" and the film Amadeus. Mozart life was short, alas for us, too short, but it was not a tragedy.

Paul johnson at his best: objective, direct and passionate. He never dodges difficult questions with rumors or simple, and frequently wrong, answers.

I keep buying this over and over over because “everyone” wants to read it. A short and compelling account that is not treacly or technical - a just right bio.

Good price and good delivery speed

Excelente biografía de Mozart, aspectos desconocidos, muy buena lectura

Recommended by for serious western classical music aficionados, especially Amazing Amadeus