Word: mozarts
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...MOZART by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, translated by Marion Faber Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 408 pages...
Author Hildesheimer wastes no time telling us that he is the sort of fellow more interested in the hole than the doughnut. "Our task," he states, "is to blot out existing ideas, but not to mediate between Mozart and the reader. On the contrary, the intention of this study is to make the distance between both sides even greater . . . between Mozart's inner life and our inadequate conception of its nature and dimension...
What follows is not mostly Mozart but mostly Hildesheimer. His book is an exercise in middlebrow beating that challenges the accepted premises of biography: a life is a story with a beginning, middle and end that exerts a satisfying dramatic unity and humanizes its subject. Such notions are wishful thinking and Philistine romanticism, says the author. His own view is that the meanings of Mozart's life and music are completely separate, that Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus in fact hid behind his nonverbal art. The author paraphrases Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni: "Don Juan is not someone who creates himself...
...Mozart spoke music more fluently than anyone else who ever lived. But he kept no journal and left no autobiography. There are, of course, his famous letters. He was always respectful and loving to the censorious Papa Leopold. For Maria Anna Thekla ("Bäsle"), the "little cousin" from Augsburg, he concocted an impish scatology ("Our arses shall be the symbol of our peacemaking!"), and his epistolary requests for from his generous friend Michael Puchberg read like a parody of abject pleading...
...accident on Connery Pond, near Lake Placid, N.Y. Simmons conducted at England's prestigious Glyndebourne Festival and led many of the major orchestras in the U.S. He gained acclaim for his dynamism and adventurous programming. This month he was to have conducted a work of his favorite composer, Mozart's The Magic Flute, at the New York City Opera. Said Beverly Sills: "Cal had so much to offer. I just can't take...