Gutman Robert W. Mozart: A Cultural Biography

Pimlico Books, 2000. — 864 p.This major work, the result of years of careful study and analysis, places Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life and music in the context of the intellectual, political and artistic currents of eighteenth-century Europe. The result is a fresh interpretation of Mozart's genius, as Robert Gutman shows the great composer in a new light. With an informed and sensitive handling, Mozart emerges as an affectionate and generous man with family and friends, self-deprecating, witty, and winsome but also an austere moralist, incisive and purposeful. The major genres in which Mozart worked-chamber music, liturgical, theater and keyboard compositions, concertos, operas, symphonies, and oratorios-are unfolded to reveal a man of luminous intellect. Mozart is an extraordinary portrait of a man and his times and a brilliant distillation of musical thought.
The decades I have passed studying Mozart have rich recompense in both acquaintance with and loving admiration for this affectionate and generous man, an austere moralist of vital force, incisiveness, and strength of purpose who, though—like all—bearing the blame of faults and lapses, yet played his role in the human comedy with honor, engaging with grace the frustrations of his complicated existence: his goodness of heart, unaffected charm, winning ways, and self-humor run like gorgeous threads through its web. His biography and his creations receive my simultaneous attention, for Mozart’s career took shape and meaning from the preoccupations of the mind with the works even as he responded to the spirit of his times. This full-scale study thus places him against the flow of his era’s intellectual, political, and artistic currents as well as its daily routines, its domestic ways. However, the name of Mozart informs these excursions into cultural, musical, and traditional history: during their course, the reader will seldom lose sight of him.