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Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life: Selected Letters

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Anyone who has ever heard any of Mozart's work knows that he is a fantastic composer - arguably the best ever. But every recording of every one of Mozart's pieces could not begin to provide the glimpse into Mozart's life that this book does. Contained herein are hundreds of Mozart's letters to those close to him, starting from when he was a boy traveling around Europe to a mere three months before his death in 1791. And whilst the fact that all of these letters are translations does make for some awkward reading at times, it also adds to the authenticity and thusly makes it all the more interesting.

I cannot recommend Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life highly enough to anyone interested in Wolfgang Mozart. It is an unparalleled first-hand account of Mozart's life by the man himself, and is a must have for any classical music enthusiast's collection.

What a fine accomplishment! According to the introduction, this book contains about 2/3 of Mozart's surviving correspondence. It has letters from and to Mozart and the translations are very lively and bring the personality of the composer to life. In older translations it seems that care was taken to make him sound like the monumental cultural force that he has become. But in this book, Mozart is a boy, a young man, a young husband, a fiery genius, and at times lost, grieving, and even confused.

The book is organized chronologically and provides biographical information that gives each letter some context. There are many useful footnotes as well as a couple of maps and list of Mozart's travels. The author has even included some notes about the various currencies in order to help the reader understand the discussions of money in the letters.

I can't emphasize enough what a lively read this book is. I found that I simply didn't get bogged down and enjoyed reading it. Yes, there are some portions of some letters I skipped, but that is one of the beauties of the book. You don't get lost simply because you skipped some mundane portions of one letter or another.

Mr. Spaethling is to be congratulated on this fine achievement. If you are interested in Mozart in any way, this book will deepen your appreciation of the living breathing person who wrote all that music. It didn't come from some alien dimension. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, this wonderful and complex human being did it all and we are much richer for it.

Mozart's full and final dedication to his work was exemplary; no doubt, his music spoke for the conscience of the world and his audience felt an almost religious faith in it. But the young man had frivolous and fun-loving personality, and his closeness to infantile notions was apparent with friends, relatives and pupils.
Mozart was possessor of the least inhibited tongue even in his contacts with serious foundations like Archbishopric or Freemasonry that mismatched the depth of notes he wrote.
This composer genius was filled with spontaneous strong-willed passion for music if weak-witted for romance and throughout the wide spectrum of his works involving every conceivable style of symphonies, operas, and orchestral pieces - some of the finest ever written - Mozart produced something truer than love.

Those of us who know a little about Mozart believe that he was perfection incarnate, part angel, fluttering down to endow the world with heavenly music. (There probably is some truth to that.) This book, however, reveals a whole new side of Mozart, a very human side. As beautiful as Mozart's music is, the more beautiful it becomes after reading this book. Understanding his big heart, hard work and, yes, even imperfections, increases one's appreciation of his music.

This book enabled Mozart come to life for me. The translation was very good. It showed, (in english), how Mozart worked on his grammar and spelling as he got older. Since he was "home educated", he had to work at this.

I could not put this book down, reading a few letters every day, I saw how Mozart grew from a boy into a man with a family. He was a really good guy, it's a shame he had to die so young.

I would say, to anyone who wants to know more about Mozart, buy this book. You can form your own opinion of him, then you can buy the "expert's" books.

After having read this book, I would like to know more about Constanze!

If you are interested in everyday lives and struggles of geniuses, this is a book for you. Most of us know Mozart as a great composer, but he also wrote passionate letters to his friends and loved ones. His writing style and personality allow us to understand his times more and to have a closer look at the person that he was.

This is a most welcome book, steeped in our age's current obsession of demythologizing Mozart and discovering the authentic historical truth of Mozart the man.

As late as 1938, Emily Anderson already had translated in English "The Letters of Mozart and his Family", which was not complete, but an extensive selection. A Victorian at heart, she used a beautiful, high-sounding polished English, which bore little resemblance to the real, natural style of Mozart, as has been strongly underlined by Robert Spaethling, the most recent translator of note of Mozart's Letters.
Spaethling rightly mentions that Emily Anderson made Mozart sound like his stiffly sententious and pedagogical father Leopold.
Emily Anderson cannot entirely be blamed, since the German edition used by her had already bowdlerized Mozart's own writings. Only in 1975 was completed for the first time a German edition of Mozart's letters in their original, natural language and style ("Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen", by Bauer, Deutsch & Eibl, in 7 volumes, published by Bärenreiter Verlag, Kassel, 1962-1975.) The title means: "Mozart: Letters & Documents". This historical edition has not yet been translated into English. This is where Spaethling came in.

Robert Spaethling, an American academic, born and raised in Bavaria where the local dialect is close to that of Salzburg, decided the time was right for producing a new English translation of Mozart's letters (2000, Norton & Co), which is only a selection, a fact not very clearly disclosed in the title.
Nonetheless, this new book is historically significant for our English-speaking world, as it is a significant contribution to the job of cleaning up Mozart's image of its Romantic polish and of all the spurious connotations of a "divine" Mozart, so beloved by the 19th-century Romantics and Victorians.
Spaethling set himself the task of preserving all the original colors, crudities, language games, and mannerisms of Mozart's natural style. Mozart was a superb and fun writer, vivacious and insightful, with a lively and spontaneous style, unlike any other professional writer, and Spaethling is to be unreservedly admired and complimented for his unique success in rendering Mozart's colloquial German style in equivalent English.

Our serious regrets are first, that the selected letters are, alas, often not completely translated, arbitrarily subjected to unwelcome cuts marked by ellipses, a breach of the promise made in the main title "Mozart' Letters, Mozart's Life"; and, second, that Spaethling was discouraged from translating ALL of Mozart's letters -- which is a big shame.
The mention of "Selected Letters" does appear under the main title on the cover, but in faint white italics drowned in brown, making the qualification not very readable. All these drastic cuts meant to provide an "easy read" to the public, and give his book a wider market. This is a book that could nearly be sold in any outlet.

Although it was not within the scope of this translation, in reality the letters from his father, Leopold, are critical in throwing complete light on the events and discussions related in Mozart's own letters. Most of these letters are to his father, and cover about a decade's worth of correspondence between the two. Without reading the father's side of the relationship, we have only a one-sided perception of the situations and miss a huge amount of the value of Mozart's letters.
A huge quantity of information comes to us through the letters of Leopold, and the dialogue between the two is what makes this exchange fascinating and instructive, both on Mozart and on his time. Leopold made Mozart, and their letters vividly illustrate how their relationship gradually changed from adored father/loving child to that of managing coach/performer and finally to overbearing mentor/independent artist.

Here, in this new book, we have the opposite of what was done in the British book translating the famous musical biography of Mozart by Hermann Abert (a 1,515-page magnum opus recently published by Yale in 2007), with dense text, pages heavily loaded with content, and an immensity of notes with microscopic font -- giving us tremendous value for money.
The Spaethling book, on the contrary, has large font, wide spacings, huge margins, and little text per page -- in short it is afflicted with all the drawbacks of deceptive American packaging, aimed at making merchandise look more substantial than it really is.

And our vivid hope is that -- since Robert Spaethling now has abundant leisure time in retirement, and since he has already honed his skill in fashioning an acceptable English rendition of Mozart's natural German style -- he may, as the natural extension of his last project, seriously consider tackling the much bigger job of fully translating the now fundamental Bärenreiter's seven volumes of "Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen" ("Mozart: Letters & Documents"). This would give a splendid purpose to the use of his retirement time and assure him a lasting place in Mozart's bibliography and scholarship.

This new potentially complete translation by Spaethling, if it ever happens, would be as valuable to us as the translation of Mozart's musical biography by the celebrated Hermann Abert.
Norton editor, please pass on this important message to Robert Spaethling, and encourage him to proceed with this new translation.
Nobody else but he has the talent to undertake this urgently needed job with the kind of quality and sureness of tone he's demonstrated in the present book of Selected Letters.
This new, modern translation would restore the authentic style of the complete text of "Mozart: Letters and Documents", and radically illuminate Mozart as a man anchored in his time and culture.
This new book should be a bit shorter than the original German (English usually requires 2/3ds of the space of a German text), and probably, with the right font, similar in size to the current Abert book on Mozart, 1,500 to 2,000 pages. Like the German Bärenreiter edition, it also could be published in many volumes.

The current translation of Mozart's Selected Letters gives us a foretaste of what a hypothetical "great" Spaethling edition of the Complete Letters could be. This potential future book, still to be produced, together with the monumental book by Hermann Abert on "Mozart" recently published in English, would become the two fundamental texts of any future Mozart study in our English-speaking world.
Spaethling then has a historical mission thrown on his shoulders and we can only urge him to go ahead and complete the job he's so well started.
We can remember Richard Strauss's wife urging him "Richard, go and compose!" We feel like saying too: "Mr. Spaethling, please go and continue translating."

ROO.BOOKAROO
March 6, 2010

These letters provide wonderful insight into the life of the man who was Mozart. These are not just letters from the Divine Maestro writing about his music, but mostly from the fun loving master of silly yet clever wordplay and language games; the virtuoso of scatology; the fool who falls in love head over heels but is rejected by the object of his infatuation; the son, all alone with his mother on her deathbed in a dark and depressing Parisian room; the lover who sometimes writes horny and funny, passionate words to his wife; the cash-strapped protégé, constantly begging patrons and moneylenders for more money.
I've always loved the Maestro Mozart, but I confess I like the Maestro/Man Trazom even better.