Mozart

From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history,Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idleand through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or notMozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his lifeand perhaps most notably his social lifewith tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wideencompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on thingstapping his feetjabbering awaybut who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profoundsearchingand melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneouslya character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watchingstudyinggathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes BrahmesMozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford revealsit’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutionsas well as the Baroque periodwithout studying the man himself.