Volume 35, Number 13 · August 18, 1988
The Residue of Genius
By Joseph Kerman
1791: Mozart's Last Year
by H.C. Robbins Landon
Schirmer Books, 240 pp., $19.95
Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores
by Alan Tyson
Harvard University Press, 381 pp., $35.00
That Peter Shaffer's Amadeus left in its wake widespread curiosity, even anxiety, about its eponymous antihero is probably true; musicologists at parties are still being asked what Mozart was 'really' like, what 'really' did him in. What went wrong in his last years? At the more bookish of such parties, people remember the disturbing Mozart by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Shaffer's inspiration, which appeared in translation in 1982.[1] So I am not at all surprised to learn from the music historian H.C. Robbins Landon that he was pressed to write a book on Mozart's 'decline and fall'—his own term, and his own quotes: a book that, on the basis of 'authentic and contemporary documents,' would set the record straight.
Review, 2008 words
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