Alfred Einstein (1880–1952)

This is more than a biography, rather this book by an acclaimed musicologist who helped revise the catalogue of Mozart's works is a guide to the meaning and background of Mozart's music. In the preface, Einstein says that the "present volume is not an introduction to Mozart's life and music. It addresses itself to readers who already know and love at least some of his works."

The book isn't structured by chronological order, but by theme. The first section of about a hundred pages is dedicated to "The Man" (and even that part is organized thematically), the second, shorter section to "The Musician" (universality, contemporaries, process of creation, counterpoint, choice of keys), and the rest, about two-thirds are devoted to a gloss on his works: the instrumental works, the vocal works, opera.

This was published in 1944, and I'm sure scholarship has moved on since, but I still found this work more than worthy of reading and I'm sure I'll consult this work again and again when I feel like listening to a Mozart work with a better educated ear. I'm not musically sophisticated in the slightest. I can't read music or play a musical instrument, and I have never mastered the ability to say, hear the difference between the major and minor key. I'm sure someone with more musicality could get much more from this book--but even I found much here to enjoy and educate me.… (more)

like any composer, his output was shaped by economic dictates. He wrote piano concertos prolifically -- practically creating the genre as we know it -- while he was trying to establish a career in Vienna as a public virtuoso, then gave them up when that effort foundered.

But the connections that biographers draw, often simplistically, between an artist's daily and creative lives are hard to spot in Mozart's case. He didn't write turbulent music when his life was in turmoil, or impassioned music when he was in love. He composed just as regularly and as variously in good times and bad.

All of this has the effect of making him seem a somewhat remote figure, one whose essential humanity has to be inferred, like the attributes of subatomic particles, rather than observed directly.

The mathematician Mark Kac, in describing the visionary physicist Richard Feynman, identified two types of geniuses: the ordinary kind and what he called the "magicians."

"An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark."

Mozart, like Feynman, was a magician. If Beethoven's career embodied Edison's famous dictum about the comparative importance of inspiration and perspiration, Mozart's was more like a series of lightning strokes, producing one unimprovable master-piece after another.… (more)