Wolfgang Amadé Mozart
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart
David Blake
J. Bradford Robinson
CAD$63.95
Georg Knepler's biographical study explores Mozart's life and works from many new perspectives. It sheds light on Mozart's creative psyche, his political leanings and the underlying basis of his musical expression. The author not only shows the complexity of Mozart's music but also helps explain, in readily accessible language, its immediacy and appeal. This is a book about Mozart the man, Mozart the towering genius, and the universal validity of his creations.
- Written by one of the most distinguished German musicologists
- A new view of Mozart in the context of his times
- Highly acclaimed by the critics
Reviews & endorsements
"Could the composer, who lived to see the French Revolution, have been immune to revolutionary thought? Emphatically not, Knepler says. Evidence appears through careful reading of Mozart's letters and from impressive analysis of several musical works, particularly parts of the operas. The book, translated brilliantly from the German by Robinson, includes notes, index, illustrations, musical examples, and a large bibliography; an appendix offers several texts that 'played a role in Mozart's intellectual development.'...This provocative, original book is highly recommended to students of Mozart and to anyone interested in the cultural life of the alte 18th century." Choice
"Among the innumerable books triggered in 1991 by the bicentenary of Mozart's death, that of Georg Knepler shone with exceptional distinction; we are duly grateful that it reaches us, three years after the event, in a translation by J. Bradford Robinson worthy of Knepler's dense yet gracious prose. The book, neither a chronological survey nor a comprehensive Life and Works, is something much rarer: a sequence of insights into matters biographical, historical, psychological, and mythical, and into the musical techniques wherein they are incarnate....Especially moving is Knepler's final chapter....he still believes in Mozart's vision and so, surely, must we. This great book tells us why." Wilfrid Mellers, Times Literary Supplement
Product details
March 1997Paperback
9780521588232
412 pages
234 × 156 × 21 mm
0.685kg
18 b/w illus. 191 music examples
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Outline of a remarkable life
- 2. From child prodigy to genius
- 3. 'Expressing convictions and thoughts ... in notes'
- 4. Mozart's reading habits
- 5. Making things significant
- 6. The major-minor opposition
- 7. Mozart in the eyes of posterity
- 8. A turning point
- 9. Taking stock of Salzburg
- 10. The move to Vienna
- 11. Other remarkable lives
- 12. 'Mozart of the Wohltätigkeit'
- 13. Convictions and thoughts: a closer look
- 14. A traditionalist?
- 15. The question of imitation
- 16. Zerlina and the three modes of music
- 17. The 'genuine natural forms' of music
- 18. Musical portraits
- 19. How opera was dramatised by the symphony
- 20. How instrumental music was semanticized by vocal music
- 21. Conclusions from endings
- 22. Building blocks and principles of construction
- 23. 'A hostile fate - though only in Vienna'
- 24. Mozart in his day and ours.
