Word: mozart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Homer tells us that the child gods are timeless and unchanging," writes Solomon in his thesis-setting prologue, "The Myth of the Eternal Child." "In the course of time, however, Mozart's physical appearance began to diverge from the world's image of him. It was as though the grown Mozart was quite a different person, one descended from but not identical with a legendary child Mozart. The maturing historical Mozart became the porcelain-child Mozart's double, and the divine child survived his own death." Unable to escape the image that had charmed the courts of Europe when...
...latter he was bitterly disappointed, and his subsequent relations with his grown son, so piteously revealed by their correspondence, inevitably revolved around the twin subjects of career and money. Leopold, in Solomon's view, never reconciled himself to Mozart's maturity and in a thousand ways endeavored to infantilize and emasculate him. "Always pursuing his quota of freedom, Mozart constantly drew back and returned to conditions of bondage," Solomon writes. Mozart's lifelong fear of his father determined his behavior. When on July 3, 1778, his mother died in Paris, where Leopold, despite her protestations of poor health, had sent...
Solomon, a musicologist who wrote a splendid biography of Beethoven in 1977, relates these and a host of other incidents smoothly and seamlessly, providing us with just enough of the details of court protocol, carriage rides and commissions that make the late 18th century so exotic. Mozart and the members of his circle come vividly alive-not only his father and remote, tragic mother, but also Constanze, his flighty, second-choice wife who turned professional widow (and mythmaker) after his death; and his cousin Basle, with whom he not only exchanged famously scatological letters but also, Solomon suggests, enjoyed active...
...sharply written, penetrating chapters, Solomon also treats the fondness Mozart had for riddles, wordplay and bathroom humor; his passionate involvement in Freemasonry; and even, in a short chapter called "Adam," his private, symbolic use of a name that was previously regarded as a misprint of "Amada," the most common form of his middle name. If the author sometimes relies too heavily on Freudian interpretations of symbols-" ... the adoption of the name Adam also has the ancillary effect of canceling God's direct presence-Theophilus [one of Mozart's middle names]"-it is a small fault when measured against the book...
Nonmusicians need not fear endless pages of musical analyses and examples, for Solomon uses them sparingly: this is a book about a life, not compositional technique. By the time the reader encounters the dying Mozart, who was so bloated and reeking of internal corruption that witnesses said the stench was unbearable, and whose last act was to expel a torrent of brown vomit, any romantic clichas of the periwigged rococo china doll who wept when Marie Antoinette refused to kiss him have long been dispelled. In their place is a far more realistic Mozart of flesh and blood, whose musical...