Mozart: His Life and Work (Master Musicians Series)

• Publisher:    Oxford University Press, USA
• Number Of Pages:   320
• Publication Date:   2006-01-26
• ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0195182642
• ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780195182644

• Publisher:   Oxford University Press, USA
• Number Of Pages:   320
• Publication Date:   2009-09-02
• ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0195388259
• ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780195388251

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of the great icons of Western music. An amazing prodigy who toured the capitals of Europe as a child, astonishing royalty and professional musicians with his precocious skills, in his adulthood he wrote some of the finest music in the European tradition.
Julian Rushton offers a concise and up-to-date biography of this musical genius, combining a well-researched life of the composer with an introduction to the works--symphonic, chamber, sacred, and theatrical--of one of the few who have composed undisputed masterpieces in every genre of his time. Rushton presents a vivid portrait, ranging from Mozart the Wunderkind--travelling with his family from Salzburg to Vienna, Paris, London, Rome, and Milan--to the mature composer of perennially fascinating operas such as "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "The Magic Flute." During the past half-century, scholars have thoroughly explored Mozart's life and music, offering new interpretations based on their historical context, and providing a factual basis for confirming or more often debunking, fanciful accounts of the man and his work. Rushton takes full advantage of these biographical and musical studies as well as the definitive New Mozart Edition to provide an accurate account of Mozart's life and, equally important, an insightful look at the music itself, complete with illustrative musical examples.
An engaging biography for general readers that will also be an informative resource for scholars, this new addition to the prestigious Master Musicians series puts forward an authoritative interpretation of one of the defining figures of European culture.

If you are like me and have seen and enjoyed the Mozart operas and own a few CD's of his music, but cannot read music then this book is not for you. If you want to know more about Mozart the man, look elswhere as Rushton skips over details the layman might wish to know more about only to get to analyses. I wouldn't know if it is in depth or not.
The biographical information the author does relay is informative, though bland and colorless.
I wouldn't recommend this book to any but aspiring or professional classical musicians as they would be able to glean much more information from it than I, but even then, I would cite this book as an example of what is wrong with classical music and its fandom today. It completely strips ALL emotion from one of the most emotional composers who ever lived and tries to reduce him and his music to technicalities and forgets why the reader or listener chooses W.A. Mozart over his contemporaries in the first place. In short the book has no heart.

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