Description
“If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music… how inimitable are Mozart’s works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive,” the composer Joseph Haydn wrote in 1787. To a large extent the world listened; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the summit of his career enjoyed unprecedented popularity. The last decade of his short but amazingly prolific career must count as one of the most remarkable periods truly golden years in the entire history of Western music.
Written by H.C. Robbins Landon, one of America’s most eminent musicologists and the acclaimed author of 1791: Mozart’s Last Year, Mozart: The Golden Years traces Mozart’s most musically creative, and yet personally troubling period, the last decade of his life. During the first few years of this decade, during which Mozart lived at several addresses in the Imperial capital city of Vienna, he courted and married Constanze Weber, performed his own remark- able piano concertos at a series of public subscription concerts, and wrote and staged The Marriage of Figaro the first of three operas written in collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.
The Marriage of Figaro (1786), based on a play so politically radical for the time that Emperor Joseph II declared it too dangerous to stage, was spectacularly innovative in its depiction of time and the complexity and richness of its orchestration. Don Giovanni (1787) was the first opera to introduce terror -even naked fear-on the stage. Cosi fan tutte (1790) is justly celebrated for its controversial plot of seduction and its theme of the necessity of forgiveness.
Concomitant with these artistic successes and perhaps even lying at the source of them was Mozart’s darker side. Even as he enjoyed popular acclaim, Mozart was in constant financial straits, forced to borrow money from his Masonic friends, among others. Most importantly, Robbins Landon presents convincing evidence that not only did Mozart suffer from a condition psychologists would today term a manic depressive disorder, but that this condition lay behind his most creative and most deeply troubled-music of the period.
Written by one of the most highly acclaimed scholars in the field of eighteenth-century music and extensively illustrated with contemporary paintings and engravings, Mozart: The Golden Years provides a vivid account of life in the European music capital of Vienna, set against the historical background of the French Revolution and the Turkish war.
Through Robbins Landon’s close examination of Mozart’s public successes and failures, his devotion to his wife Constanze, his reaction to the death of his father Leopold Mozart in 1787. and his friendship with his older contemporary Joseph Haydn, we gain an intimate portrait of an extraordinary musical genius.
About the Author
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1926, H.C. ROBBINS LANDON is one of the world’s leading musicologists. He has been a Special Correspondent for The Times of London, writing mostly from Eastern Europe. Founder of the Haydn Society in 1949, he was responsible for the first edition of all of Haydn’s symphonies. In addition to co-editing the Collected Edition of Mozart’s works, Robbins Landon’s books include the definitive five-volume Haydn: Chronicle and Works, The Mozart Companion, Mozart and the Masons, and 1791: Mozart’s Last Year.
Robbins Landon is presently honorary Professorial Fellow of University College, Cardiff. In 1988 he was accorded life membership in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. He lives near Toulouse with his wife Else Radant, an Austrian historian and writer.
ON THE JACKET: Mozart, plaster cast by or after L. Posch, 1788-9. Goethe Museum, Düsseldorf
1989 Macmillan, Inc.
SCHIRMER BOOKS A Division of Macmillan, Inc. NEW YORK
First edition.
Hardcover.
272 pages.
