Review by Booklist Review
Solomon writes three kinds of book about Mozart: a chronicle of his life and compositions, a psychoanalysis, and a study of his music. Wolfgang's father, Leopold, depended on his son's musical skills to provide for the family. But Wolfgang rebelled, leaving Salzburg for Vienna, where he lived--somewhat beyond his means--teaching, composing, and performing for the elite. Leopold never forgave him. Wolfgang, however, needed the love of his family more than anything else to overcome recurring melancholia. The family of Constanze Weber, his wife, provided this love during the last decade of his life. Mozart generally chose to compose innovative instead of popular music, and his fortunes waxed and waned as he pursued elusive court appointments and commissions. His last major operas were the most successful financially, and they contain his yearning for approval. "His melancholia . . . a despairing cry for love," Solomon says, was never dispelled, and "in the end, music remained Mozart's primary talisman against corruption, fear, and death." Ultimately, Solomon's chronicling and psychoanalyzing are competent enough, but his musical analysis, competent or not, is tedious. ~--Alan Hirsch
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Beethoven biographer Solomon here presents a revisionist biography of Mozart, which his publisher claims is the first full-scale biography in nearly 40 years. Certainly it is a major work in terms of heft and range. Solomon will have none of the ``divine child'' approach, limning instead a man growing up under the shadow of an impossibly demanding father who was at once overprotective and jealous of his son's vast gifts. There is a great deal of psychological probing into the agonies of their relationship, much of it sensible; and Solomon paints an indelible portrait of Mozart's last years, begging for money, guilty about his deprived wife Constanze, resentful of being virtually cut out of his father's will, yet still heroically forging a new musical aesthetic. He also clears up much of the mystery about the bizarre Requiem commission, and the burial in the ``pauper's grave.'' He is convinced that Mozart and his cousin ``the Basle,'' recipient of many of the infamous smutty letters, were lovers for a time; and the portrait of the composer that emerges is of an extraordinarily sensitive, liberal-minded (the Masonic material is superb), extravagant but responsible person who has been much belittled by biographers beginning almost immediately after his death. Solomon also writes acutely about what was daringly new, and wonderfully enduring, about Mozart's music. Only a certain lack of flow between the chapters suggests the origin of much of this material in lectures. Illustrations. BOMC selection. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Solomon (music, Stonybrook Univ. and Harvard) follows up his well-received Beethoven (LJ 11/15/77) with another ambitious biography. The author explores Mozart's life and works with a wealth of facts that were culled from 18th-century sources as well as from the most recent scholarship. Mozart and his family emerge in a new light from this mass of well-chosen detail through Solomon's own convincing interpretation of events and relationships. Appropriate musical and pictorial examples, which will appeal to both scholarly and casual readers, accompany the text. The author closes the book with an impressive, well-annotated bibliography and indexes of Mozart's compositions by Köchel number and by common name. Recommended for music collections in both academic and public libraries. [BOMC main selection; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/94.]-James E. Ross, Seattle P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Finally, a Mozart biography that evokes a believable portrait of a striving, powerfully creative human being. Solomon, author of the ground-breaking life of Beethoven (1977), now turns his attention to the ``miracle which God let be born in Salzburg.'' The result is magisterial. Solomon's overriding ambition is to dismember what he calls the ``Myth of [Mozart] the Eternal Child,'' a view of the composer as a divinely inspired perpetual adolescent. The myth had its unseemly origins in the efforts of Mozart's father, Leopold, to keep his fiercely talented son subservient. By contrast, as laid out in Solomon's thoughtful, dignified and always readable narrative, one comes to appreciate that Mozart--despite numerous personal struggles and pervasive familial and societal restraints--had achieved a dramatic psychological as well as artistic maturity by the time of his death at age 35. Solomon's own ground rules are those of Freudian orthodoxy; not every reader will agree with every one of his interpretations. Still, the known facts are presented so clearly, and Solomon's analytic bias is so overt, that even a less than critical reader is in no risk of being misled. It also must be admitted that the lives of few other artists present so much material that feels right at home on the analytic couch. Mozart's father was the most successful imaginable musical pedagogue and impresario for his son; he was also a self-deceiving, self- defeating paranoid whose exploitation of both his children's phenomenal abilities feels, to a modern sensibility, perilously close to child abuse. Mozart grew from the devoted prodigy to the prolific and consummate craftsman (and, in Solomon's view, more of a musical radical than conventional musical history has been willing to allow), as well as a sometimes agonized husband and father and an emblematic member of a rapidly changing society. How he did so forms the matter of Solomon's work. A splendid book with ramifications for the whole study of Western culture, not just classical music.
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Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
