Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by Geza Rech, published by Deutscher Kunstverlag in 1978, is a German-language study of one of the very few composers whose name is recognised even by people who would struggle to identify a sonata if it landed on the kitchen table.

Mozart has, of course, become one of those cultural figures who has escaped the confines of music history and entered general civilisation. Child prodigy, court musician, prolific composer, financial worrier, traveller, letter-writer and eventual occupant of the inconvenient category “genius who died young”, he has been admired, mythologised, dramatised and repeatedly turned into evidence that somebody else’s child is not practising the piano hard enough.

This volume looks at Mozart from a German-speaking cultural perspective and is very much a book for readers interested not simply in the famous tunes but in the man, his times, his career and the world of eighteenth-century European music in which he worked.

Published by Deutscher Kunstverlag, it has the serious, cultivated feel of a continental art and culture book from the period: the sort of volume that assumes the reader is perfectly capable of concentrating for more than thirty seconds without the assistance of flashing graphics or somebody announcing “five amazing facts about Mozart you won’t believe”.

The book is entirely in German, which is important to mention because this is either an advantage or a fairly significant obstacle depending on how you got on at school. For German speakers, students, collectors and readers with an interest in Mozart, it offers a period treatment of the composer in his own broader cultural sphere. For everyone else, it may provide an excellent opportunity to discover just how much German musical terminology one can recognise through determination alone.

Mozart himself remains endlessly fascinating because his music can sound effortless while having been created by someone whose actual life was anything but. Behind the elegant melodies lies a career involving relentless travel, patronage, professional rivalry, difficult finances and the awkward necessity of earning a living while simultaneously producing some of the most enduring music ever written.

There is also something pleasingly appropriate about reading about Mozart in German. English-language readers sometimes encounter him at a slight historical distance, but German places, institutions and vocabulary sit much closer to the cultural landscape in which his life unfolded.

Published in 1978, this book is now itself a period object, dating from an era when serious music publishing still expected readers to sit down with a proper book, preferably somewhere quiet, and spend time with the subject rather than merely adding a playlist called “Classical for Focus”.

It should appeal to Mozart enthusiasts, classical music collectors, German-language readers, students of European cultural history, and anyone who likes older art and music books with rather more dignity than their modern descendants.

Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of age and handling. It has clearly survived several decades with considerably less drama than Mozart himself managed in thirty-five years.

Language: German.

No ISBN stated.

A handsome and interesting period study of Mozart for readers who prefer their classical music accompanied by history, scholarship and the occasional need for a dictionary.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where even the foreign-language books are perfectly understandable once you accept that you may not understand all of them.

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