Product Description

The first comprehensive life and works of the composer in over sixty years, by a leading Mozart specialist.

Our understanding of Mozart's life and music has broadened immensely in recent years. Much new material has come to light, including discoveries of musical sources and fresh ways of interpreting known ones. Studies in the chronology of Mozart's works, his compositional process, his relationship to the world around him—these and many other areas have yielded new thinking that has challenged or overturned the inherited wisdom.

In Mozart: The Early Years, renowned music historian Stanley Sadie discusses all aspects of the composer's life and music, relating them to the social, economic, cultural, and musical environments in which he worked. Drawing substantially on family correspondence, Sadie illuminates Mozart's world and his relationships with employers, colleagues, and family. Individual works are discussed in sequence and related to the events of the composer's life. 16 pages of illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #868093 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

From Publishers Weekly
More a biography of Mozart's music than a study of the man himself, Sadie's final opus—he died this year after publishing some 30 books—should delight musicologists but puzzle general readers. Not only is the music Sadie's primary interest, he does not believe it reveals anything, necessarily, about its composer. Indeed, he reminds readers not to impose contemporary values on Mozart's era. "Romantic eyes," for example, might see certain minor-key compositions as expressions of Mozart's grief over his mother's death, but Sadie argues that there's "no real reason to imagine that he used his music as [a] vehicle for the expression of his own personal feelings." Likewise, modern critics expect to see a certain type of progress in Mozart's oeuvre, with subsequent works building and elaborating former ones, in ways alien to Mozart on his contemporaries. Sadie is deft at situating various styles of musical composition in their cultural context: preferences for serious vs. comic opera, shorter vs. longer works, ecclesiastical vs. lay sponsorship, etc. But Sadie's real forte is his skill at dissecting musical composition—breaking it down to its constituent elements to understand its power—which is why this volume is indispensable for serious scholars, and mostly unreadable by everyone else. Illus. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Sadie, editor of that Everest of musical scholarship, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, died on March 21, 2005, leaving incomplete a massive biography of that musical Hillary, Mozart. He had finished the first volume, whose 2005 publication makes it the first splash in what may be a tidal wave of Mozart tomes in response to the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth. It is elegant, precise, and highly readable. Each chapter first reports the events of Mozart's life, then analytically reviews his compositions during the period covered. Sadie quotes extensively from father Leopold's letters written while the family toured its two astonishing children (Mozart's sister, Nannerl, was a precocious keyboard player) as well as from eyewitnesses of their performances and Nannerl's much later recollections--all of this is delicious reading in itself. Sadie's music discussions use only commonly defined terms, and his tracing of borrowings and influences is gratifyingly diligent. In short, this is the rare scholarly work fully accessible by the interested common reader. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Stanley Sadie, (1930-2005) former music critic for The Times [London] and editor of The Musical Times, published thirty books and edited the monumental New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Customer Reviews

An excellent biography of Mozart's formative years
Stanley Sadie intended to write a general biography of Mozart's life, following the completion of his labors on the titanic New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which he shepherded into existence. Sadie, himself, wrote the splendid Mozart entry, which was published separately. He completed the manuscript of the first volume of his two volume Mozart biography, covering Mozart's formative years in Salzburg and his extensive youthful travel throughout the music centers of Europe, just before passing away. Sadly, we will never see the completed work. Nevertheless, we are fortunate that we have the first extensive new biography of the early, Salzburg Mozart in more than half a century.

The first thing that strikes the modern reader concerning Mozart's Salzburg years is how much of his early music remains only partially known. Many of his youthful operas remain a cypher to the average listener. His extensive number of early sonatas for piano or violin and piano are also still relatively unheard. Most of his adolescent symphonies remain unplayed. It is not until Mozart reaches the advanced age of 19, by which time he has been composing for at least 14 years, when he quickly composes his 5 violin concertos, that we are on familiar compositional ground. The nature and extent of Mozart's numerous journeys in search of employment are a revelation to the average music lover. Europe's complex social and musical scene in the middle 18th Century, one in which Mozart was obliged to operate as a genius endowed with a profoundly independent spirit, is undiscovered country that 21st Century research is only beginning to reveal as a vast mosaic of fierce political repression and incipient rebellion. A landscape that Mozart would effect peripherally before transforming it with his mature, revolutionary operas. These significant aspects of Mozart's early years are carefully discussed in this splendid biography. Ultimately, it is Mozart's nearly incomprehensible genius that Sadie struggles to explain. He succeeds admirably.

And yet.... Despite the occasional Mozartean autograph manuscript exhibiting the evidence of compositional struggle (such as the six Haydn string quartets, with their chiaroscuro pages of cross-hatched deletions, amendations and corrections) offered as proof of his humanity, the sheer number of his masterpieces, written so swiftly and with such apparent effortlessness, prove that there is something inexplicable in Mozart. The spell he wove was miraculous. Mozart's musical martyrdom made him a hero to the Romantic generation whilst raising a sea of questions even Stanley Sadie's splendid biography must leave unanswered. The 19th Century saw something Godlike in Mozart's creative genius. Even now, in the 21st, that thought refuses to die. I recommend this biography for explaining the legend's birth, even though it cannot hope to reveal its wellspring.

Mike Birman