Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #887032 in Books
• Published on: 1991-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 444 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, German (translation)

Customer Reviews

Well done
Very well done. A great read, but I only have two reservations. No chapters, and the translation can be choppy. What I truly enjoyed was that in no way did Hildsheimer make assumptions. He would address possible suggestions of certain situations, and I commend him for he approach.

If you love Mozart pick up the book.

Mozart: perfect book
Esplendid biography written with talent and humor.
It is a worthwhile reading for classical music lovers and students.

STILL NOT OUTDONE
And will not be for a while, I suspect.

Unless a crate of new documents turns up, whatever we already know in terms of information about Mozart is not likely to get a whole lot more informative. We pretty much know all the crucial When's, Who's and What's.
That means, what we're measuring is the biographers' ability to put together all that data into something 'insightful' about a genius we can never 'really' know.

Right now, there two other contenders for the title of Best Mozart Bio: The one by Maynard Solomon and the other by Robert Gutman. If you're into (unnecessarily) long sentences and pop psychoanalysis, then the one by M. Solomon might be the thing for you. (I got a lot out of Solomon's Beethoven, but with Mozart, his psychologizing is just annoying.)
Gutman's is exhaustive...and exhausting -- to all except probably to Mozart scholars.

Now, Hilbersheimer. A deservedly well-regarded novelist and man of letters in Germany but unfortunately not as well-known in the Anglophone countries. Hildesheimer's rendering of Mozart, which started out as a lecture in 1956, is still fresh...and delightfully eccentric, but not at the expense of historical truth. Quite blunt with facts, actually: noticeable is the author's radical departure from the usual practice of scholarly 'discretion' with regard to Mozart's "deviant obsessions," which were largely coprophilic, apparently.

Hildesheimer's affection for Mozart's genius is genuine but not adulatory. (And as if to emphasize the authenticity of Mozart's true genius, the author, strangely enough, does take some potshots throughout the book at Rilke as an example of a "fake genius." )
Anyway, here you get just enough psychology -- without feeling like you're reading a therapist's evaluation sheets --to give you a sense of the man's pathological quirks that made him a man and not a god. You get enough of the cultural milieu to appreciate how little Wolfie became the MOZART -- without having to pop a No-Doz pill just to get through all the tedious historical detail. And you get, more than perhaps anywhere else, a real insight into Mozart the GUY who just happened to be a musical genius, AND who also happened to have one bawdy sense of humor!

Example: When Mozart had nothing else to do, he himself kept up his sister's journal, describing the vegetative life in a humorous (and often ill-humored) way, in pointed contrast to the dry unemotional entries of his sister, whose voice he assumed:
"The 17th: With Katherl at the home of Mlle the Saint, who picks her nose with her big toe."
"The 19th: Stayed home with a pipe up the arse, with the pipe up the arse..."
"The 52nd: Lodron at our house in the afternoonish. We went to Fiala's. At 3 o'clock all of us went a walking, welking, wulking, wolking, wilking. It day a fine was."
"The 82nd: a half to niney, blow one out behindy in church.
At quarter past niney, blow one out behindey at Mayr's...."

In short, it's the quirky style of German prose whose literary lineage goes all the way back to the great Baroque novel 'Simplicius Simplicissmus' -- and the content as shaped by such a style -- that makes this version of Mozart so enjoyable.

By definition, no Bio is going to be "definitive," and any that claims to be one is bunk. So, whatever else you might read about Mozart, be sure to include this one too. New scholarship may shed more light on the minutiae of Mozart's life but only Hildesheimer's gives you a Mozart you can imagine as a contemporary.