Mozart: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives) [Hardcover]

Peter Gay (Author)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Lives | Publication Date: June 1, 1999

The greatest mind in Western music, by a National Book Award-winning writer on culture and psychology.

Mozart's unshakable hold on the public's fascination can only be strengthened by the historian and biographer Peter Gay's bold, new perspective. His passionate and painstaking research reveals truths more fascinating than the myths that have long shrouded the maestro's life. Here is the archetypal child prodigy whose genius triumphed over early precociousness, and who later broke away from a loving but tyrannical father to pursue his vision unhampered.

Peter Gay's Mozart traces the legendary development of the man whose life was a whirlwind of achievement, and the composer who pushed every instrument to its limit and every genre--especially opera--into new realms. More than an engrossing biography, this is a meditation on the nature of genius and, for any music lover, a trove of new critical insights.

Penguin Lives pairs celebrated writers with famous individuals who have shaped our thinking.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his lifetime, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart didn't have the best of luck with his patrons. One of them, Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg, actually had his chamberlain kick the composer in the ass to signal the end of his employment. Mozart has been luckier, however, with his biographers. In the last 20 years alone, he has been the subject of two fine books: Maynard Solomon's meticulous study, which slides Mozart's rather mystifying psyche under the analytic microscope, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer's more sardonic effort, in which the author seems determined to strip every last bit of romantic varnish from the traditional portrait.

Now Peter Gay joins the party with his own brief life. Weighing in at 177 pages, Mozart will never displace its deep-focus predecessors. But it's a delightful introduction to the composer, whose entire existence was, as Gay puts it, a "triumph of genius over precociousness." It's one thing, after all, to knock 'em dead at age five--at which point the waist-high Mozart was already a keyboard virtuoso. It's quite another to keep developing at the same prodigious pace. "A child prodigy is, by its nature, a self-destroying artifact: what seems literally marvelous in a boy will seem merely talented and perfectly natural in a young man. But by 1772, at sixteen, Mozart no longer needed to display himself as a little wizard; he had matured in the sonata and the symphony, the first kind of music he composed, and now showed his gifts in new domains: opera, the oratorio, and the earliest in a string of superb piano concertos."

Gay gets in all the essentials: Mozart's mind-blowing maturation, his family life, his weakness for billiards, and (of course) his seriously scatological style as a correspondent. Like Solomon, he takes an Oedipal approach to Wolfgang's perpetual head-banging with his overbearing father. And like Hildesheimer, he's at pains to scotch certain cherished myths--the mysterious figure who commissioned the Requiem, for example, turns out to be no otherworldly harbinger of death but a chiseling wannabe who hoped to pass off the finished product as his own work. Perhaps best of all, Gay never goes sublime on us. His portrait is attractively level-headed, and at one point he's even modest enough to knock his own metaphors for their puerility. Here, surely, the author is being hard on himself. But he's right about one thing: as far as artistry goes, this former child prodigy does make children of us all. --James Marcus

From Publishers Weekly

In the new Penguin Lives series, edited by former New York Times editor James Atlas, Gay's Mozart biography comes with particularly high expectations, given the author's distinction as a historian (he won the National Book Award for volume one of The Enlightenment). There is little new information here, yet Gay's overview of the composer's life and work is lucid and concise. Noted for his studies of Freud and Victorian society, the author clearly knows the Mozart literature as well. His book includes a fine bibliographical essay, in which he admits to leaning on Maynard Solomon's 1995 tome, Mozart: A Life. Gay provides brief glimpses into the social and historical contexts of Mozart's music: changing attitudes toward listening, the economics of composition and new audience sectors. Also notable is the discussion of how well Mozart's works were received and the author's survey of how Mozart was regarded by subsequent composers. Gay offers a straightforward and helpful introduction to Mozart, debunking romantic interpretations of the composer's life. (Gay maintains that Mozart's burial in an unmarked grave was due to the practice of the period, when extravagant funerals were frowned upon, rather than to poverty.) However, in a book this size, it's hard to stay away from the occasional oversimplified phrase (Mozart "could not have written mediocre music if he tried"). While Gay's judgments of Mozart's works are mostly unsurprising and in line with general opinion, they are discussed vividly and with enthusiasmAand bolstered with famous quotes and thorough references. BOMC selection. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1st ptg. edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670882380
• ISBN-13: 978-0670882380
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,318,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #67 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( M ) > Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A delightful gem of a biography, compact yet informative, October 23, 2000

By 

Richard E. Hegner (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mozart: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

Peter Gay's brief biography of Mozart is the third of the new Penguin Lives which I have read, but only the first to offer a reasonably complete portrait. (The others were "Mao Zedong" by Jonathan Spence, which seemed disappointingly incomplete, and "Woodrow Wilson" by Louis Auchincloss, which seemed terribly superficial.) As an eminent cultural historian of Europe since the Enlightenment and a native of German-speaking Europe himself, Gay is more than qualified to write a superior life story of Mozart and certainly rises to the occasion with a captivating style that made reading this book a pleasure.

For a book that is only 163 pages long, exclusive of endnotes and bibliographic essay, this volume offers an unusually full picture. It depicts Mozart as man and musician, while placing him and his art in the context of his times. Gay delves into Mozart's complex relationship with his autocratic father, describing his evolution from docile Wunderkind to assertive mature artist. He also explores Mozart's unusual personality, including his often juvenile sense of humor, his devoted commitment to his wife, his tendency to constantly live beyond his means and the resulting sometimes obsequious dependency on his patrons, and his interactions with contemporary composers, particularly Johann Christoph Bach and Franz Josef Haydn. Gay is especially good at explaining Mozart's major contributions to the development of classical music in terms that even someone who lacks a technical understanding of music can fathom, showing how he contributed to chamber music, the symphony, and opera. And he briefly points out what is distinctive about a number of the composers' major works.

In short, this is a book that offers all the fun of "Amadeus," but a far more satisfying portrayal of Mozart and a fuller explication of why he is an icon of Western civilization. For readers who lack much knowledge about the composer, Gay does an artful job of tantalizing them into wanting to learn more, then pointing the way with a helpful and thorough bibliographical essay.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Triumph of Genius over Preociousness, October 25, 2002

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mozart: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

This is one of several volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Each provides a concise but remarkably comprehensive biography of its subject in combination with a penetrating analysis of the significance of that subject's life and career. I think this is a brilliant concept. Those who wish to learn more about the given subject are directed to other sources.

When preparing to review various volumes in this series, I have struggled with determining what would be of greatest interest and assistance to those who read my reviews. Finally I decided that a few brief excerpts and then some concluding remarks would be appropriate.

On misconceptions of Mozart (e.g. the "willful child" unable to grow up, the "miracle worker" who never needed to revise a single note): "These tenacious caricatures are distortions rather than fabrications; most of them, as we shall discover, contain a kernel of truth....But Mozart's life in music is fascinating enough without embroidery; his reputation as a genius is not threatened by mundane truths." (Page 2)

In a letter to his father (1781): "Nature speaks as loudly in me as in anyone, and perhaps louder than in many big, strong lugs. I cannot possibly live like most of the young men today. -- First, I have too much religion; secondly, too much love for my fellow beings and too honorable a disposition to seduce an innocent girl; and thirdly, too much horror and repugnance, dread and fear of diseases, and too much care for my health to scuffle with whores." (Page 70)

Peter Gay on Salieri: "There is an all-too-well-known melodramatic tale about Antonio Salieri poisoning Mozart. It began as a rumor and was first given literary form in the 1820s in a verse playlet by Pushkin. It is a malicious, preposterous fabrication, but hints at the envy Mozart's rivals had every right to feel. Yet Mozart, too, had grounds for envy: Salieri, born in Italy but long settled in Vienna, occupied privileged posts that Mozart would have deserved but, given Emperor Joseph's predilection for Salieri, could never hope to obtain." (Page 100)

Mozart's last year: "[It] has often been described as one long preparation for death. But in that time, Mozart wrote two operas, a piano concerto, a large number of minuets and counterdances, a clarinet concerto, a Masonic cantata, two quintets, and most of the Requiem. His creativity was still working at full speed." (Page 156)

I am among those who have seen the film Amadeus many times, admiring it more each time. For dramatic purposes, those who produced Amadeus focus on several of the "tenacious caricatures" to which Gay refers. What I especially appreciate about this biography is that Gay duly acknowledges all of Mozart's human limitations and inadequacies while examining Mozart's creative discipline in ways and to an extent which the film does not. With regard to this biography's context, Gay tells his reader only what is essential to know about the various cities in which Mozart lived and worked during various periods in his all-too-brief life (January 27,1756-December 5, 1791). Rather than create an historical or cultural context, Gay prefers to focus primarily on Mozart's art. As he notes, the renewal of interest more than a century after Mozart's death raised his music -- "all of it -- to the eminence it deserves."

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A short biography of a Mozart's short life., August 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Mozart: A Penguin Life (Penguin Lives) (Hardcover)

For anyone who has ever wanted to know about Mozart, but does not want to dig through massive tomes, or the intracacies of counterpoint, Peter Gay gives a thorough linear analysis of Mozart, his life, and times. Describing the growth of a musical genius, with commentaries on major works, Gay places Mozart firmly in his historic period. We see the role of the musician as hired tradesman and Mozart trying to equate his genius with social standing, only to play secaond fiddle to the second rate. An excellent and enjoyable window into a complex mind and a brief but indelible life.