MUSIC: Mozart Biography

Most extraordinary of all musical geniuses was Austria’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Starting his career as a four-fold infant prodigy (harpsichordist, violinist, organist, composer), he wrote, during his short lifetime of 35 years, more music than most great composers who lived twice as long.

A fondled Wunderkind, he sat in the Empress Maria Theresa’s lap, was petted by Madame de Pompadour, spent hours playing private concerts for England’s demented music-loving George III. But chronic improvidence and a generous nature gradually brought him into a tangle of debts and grinding responsibilities.

When he died of typhus in 1791, he was impoverished, all but friendless. He was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, since lost.

Because Mozart was one of music’s most fastidious craftsmen, the deep human and emotional qualities of his music have often been overlooked. This week the noted English Critic Walter James Turner publishes a critical biography of him.* With a hitherto untranslated collection of letters to draw upon, Author Turner shows Mozart to be a lusty, even ribald character, with a stout heart, a lively sympathy for his fellow man—and woman. Reminding his readers that Mozart’s generation was also Goethe’s and William Blake’s, that its spirit was in fact romantic and revolutionary rather than classical, Critic Turner ends romantically by finding Mozart’s music equivalent to William Shakespeare.

* MOZART: THE MAN AND His WORKS—W. J. Turner —Knopf ($4). </FOOTNOTE