Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007
The Best Book on Mozart
By Charles Rosen
W.A. Mozart
by Hermann Abert, edited by Cliff Eisen, and translated from the German by Stewart Spencer
Yale University Press, 1,600 pp., $55.00
Another book in English on Mozart might not seem to be a pressing need just now after the extravagant outpouring of the 250th anniversary of his birth last year, but we have waited a long time for this one. When, eighty-eight years ago, Hermann Abert's W.A. Mozart appeared, it was recognized as the most authoritative survey of the composer's life and works. (It claimed to be a revision of Otto Jahn's pathbreaking life of Mozart of 1882, but in fact almost nothing was left of Jahn; when one of Jahn's observations does appear in Abert, it is quoted as if from an external source, so it is just as well that Jahn's name is no longer displayed on the title page.)
Review, 4011 words
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