On Mozart

by Edited by James M. Morris

• ISBN13: 9780521476614
• ISBN10: 0521476615
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-11-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The book is an attempt to suggest how much more complicated a figure Mozart was than popular legends and media portrayals would have us believe. He was surely a genius - in that, the legends are correct, and the evidence abounds - but he was also a working composer in a society crowded with working composers, and he had to make a living at his craft to maintain the style of living to which he and his family had become accustomed. By observing a realistic and human genius, the collection of essays portrays a more complex individual than the divinely inspired Mozart of myth, who took his notes directly from God.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Approaching Mozart Denis Donoghe

How extraordinary was Mozart? Howard Gardner

Mozart and the transformational imperative David Henry Feldman

On the economics of musical composition in Mozart's Vienna William J. Baumol and Hilda Baumol

Mozart as a working stiff Neal Zaslow

The challenge of blank paper: Mozart the composer Christoph Wolff

Marianne Mozart Carissima Sorella Mia Maynard Solomon

Mozart's concertos and their audience Joseph Kerman

Mozart's tunes and the comedy of closure Wye J. Allanbrook

Don Giovanni against the Baroque or the culture punished Michael P. Steinberg

Nineteenth-century Mozart: The Fin-de-Siecle Mozart revival Leon Botstein

The abduction from the theater: Mozart opera on film Stanley Kauffmann.