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Mad Music
Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel
Stephen Budiansky
University Press of New England, 2014
Mad Music is the story of Charles Edward Ives (1874–1954), the innovative American composer who achieved international recognition, but only after he’d stopped making music. While many of his best works received little attention in his lifetime, Ives is now appreciated as perhaps the most important American composer of the twentieth century and father of the diverse lines of Aaron Copland and John Cage. Ives was also a famously wealthy crank who made millions in the insurance business and tried hard to establish a reputation as a crusty New Englander. To Stephen Budiansky, Ives’s life story is a personification of America emerging as a world power: confident and successful, yet unsure of the role of art and culture in a modernizing nation. Though Ives steadfastly remained an outsider in many ways, his life and times inform us of subjects beyond music, including the mystic movement, progressive anticapitalism, and the initial hesitancy of turn-of-the-century-America modernist intellectuals. Deeply researched and elegantly written, this accessible biography tells a uniquely American story of a hidden genius, disparaged as a dilettante, who would shape the history of music in a profound way. Making use of newly published letters—and previously undiscovered archival sources bearing on the longstanding mystery of Ives’s health and creative decline—this absorbing volume provides a definitive look at the life and times of a true American original.
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Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests
The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater
David J. Buch
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Drawing on hundreds of operas, singspiels, ballets, and plays with supernatural themes, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests argues that the tension between fantasy and Enlightenment-era rationality shaped some of the most important works of eighteenth-century musical theater and profoundly influenced how audiences and critics responded to them.

David J. Buch reveals that despite—and perhaps even because of—their fundamental irrationality, fantastic and exotic themes acquired extraordinary force and popularity during the period, pervading theatrical works with music in the French, German, and Italian mainstream. Considering prominent compositions by Gluck, Rameau, and Haydn, as well as many seminal contributions by lesser-known artists, Buch locates the origins of these magical elements in such historical sources as ancient mythology, European fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, and the occult. He concludes with a brilliant excavation of the supernatural roots of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, building a new foundation for our understanding of the magical themes that proliferated in Mozart’s wake. 
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Mahler's Symphonic World
Music for the Age of Uncertainty
Karol Berger
University of Chicago Press
A new analysis of Mahler’s symphonies, placing each within the context of his musical way of being in and experiencing the world.

Between 1888 and 1909 Gustav Mahler completed nine symphonies; the tenth was left incomplete at his death in 1911. Mahler’s Symphonic World makes a radical claim: that over his lifetime, the composer pursued a single vision, a single ideal symphony, striving to capture in his music a philosophical outlook on human existence. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Mahler found himself in a spiritual situation in which all trust in firm foundations had evaporated. In Karol Berger’s analysis, each of Mahler’s symphonies reflects his preoccupation with human suffering and transience and his search for sources of possible consolation. Through detailed analysis of individual symphonies, Berger traces how the same images and plots appear in different works and how the borderlines between symphonies can become porous. Mahler’s Symphonic World uncovers the single ideal symphony that Berger asserts the composer was pursuing all his life, locates Mahler’s music within the matrix of intellectual currents that defined his epoch, and offers a revelatory picture of his musical way of being in the world.
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Making Light
Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism
Raymond Knapp
Duke University Press, 2018
In Making Light Raymond Knapp traces the musical legacy of German Idealism as it led to the declining prestige of composers such as Haydn while influencing the development of American popular music in the nineteenth century. Knapp identifies in Haydn and in early popular American musical cultures such as minstrelsy and operetta a strain of high camp—a mode of engagement that relishes both the superficial and serious aspects of an aesthetic experience—that runs antithetical to German Idealism's musical paradigms. By considering the disservice done to Haydn by German Idealism alongside the emergence of musical camp in American popular music, Knapp outlines a common ground: a humanistically based aesthetic of shared pleasure that points to ways in which camp receptive modes might rejuvenate the original appeal of Haydn's music that has mostly eluded audiences. In so doing, Knapp remaps the historiographical modes and systems of critical evaluation that dominate musicology while troubling the divide between serious and popular music.
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Masterworks of the Orchestral Repertoire
A Guide for Listeners
Donald N. Ferguson
University of Minnesota Press, 1968

Masterworks of the Orchestral Repertoire was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The fullest enjoyment of an orchestral performance or a record concert comes with a background of knowledge about the music itself. This handbook is designed to help music lovers get the ultimate pleasure from their listening by providing them with that background about a large portion of the orchestral repertoire.

Professor Ferguson analyzes and interprets the most important classical symphonies, overtures, and concertos, as well as selected orchestral works of modern composers. He goes beyond a conventional analysis of structure since he believes (with a majority of the music-loving public) that great music is actually a communication -- that it expresses significant emotions. The great composers, on their own testimony, have striven not merely to create perfect forms but to interpret human experience. Mingled with the analyses, then, the reader will find comments on the expressive purport of the music.

For twenty-five years Professor Ferguson has supplied the program notes for the subscription concerts of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, and this volume is an outgrowth of that activity. In preparing the material for book publication, however, he studied the musical compositions anew, and the resulting chapters provide a much deeper exploration of the musical subjects than did the program notes. The themes of important works are illustrated by musical notations, and a brief glossary explains technical terms.

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"Maximum Clarity" and Other Writings on Music
Ben Johnston. Edited by Bob Gilmore
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Described by New York Times critic John Rockwell as "one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer," Ben Johnston reconceives familiar idioms--ranging from neoclassicism and serialism to jazz and southern hymnody--using just intonation. Johnston studied with Darius Milhaud, Harry Partch, and John Cage, and is best known for his String Quartet No. 4, a complex series of variations on Amazing Grace.

This collection spans forty years and brings together forty-one of Johnston's most important writings, including many rare and several previously unpublished selections. They include position papers, theoretical treatises, program notes, historical reflections, lectures, excerpts from interviews, and letters, and they cover a broad spectrum of concerns--from the technical exegesis of microtonality to the personal and the broadly humanistic. A discography of commercially available recordings of Johnston's music closes out the collection.

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The Melodramatic Moment
Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820
Edited by Katherine G Hambridge and Jonathan Hicks
University of Chicago Press, 2018
We seem to see melodrama everywhere we look—from the soliloquies of devastation in a Dickens novel to the abject monstrosity of Frankenstein’s creation, and from Louise Brooks’s exaggerated acting in Pandora’s Box to the vicissitudes endlessly reshaping the life of a brooding Don Draper.

This anthology proposes to address the sometimes bewilderingly broad understandings of melodrama by insisting on the historical specificity of its genesis on the stage in late-eighteenth-century Europe.  Melodrama emerged during this time in the metropolitan centers of London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin through stage adaptations of classical subjects and gothic novels, and they became famous for their use of passionate expression and spectacular scenery. Yet, as contributors to this volume emphasize, early melodramas also placed sound at center stage, through their distinctive—and often disconcerting—alternations between speech and music. This book draws out the melo of melodrama, showing the crucial dimensions of sound and music for a genre that permeates our dramatic, literary, and cinematic sensibilities today.

A richly interdisciplinary anthology, The Melodramatic Moment will open up new dialogues between musicology and literary and theater studies.
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Messa da Requiem
Critical Edition Study Score
Giuseppe Verdi
University of Chicago Press, 2016
The Works of Giuseppe Verdi is the first critical edition of the composer’s oeuvre. Together with his operas, the series presents his songs, his choral music and sacred pieces, and his string quartet and other instrumental works.

This edition of Messa da Requiem is based on Verdi’s autograph score and other original sources. The appendices include two pieces from the compositional history of the Requiem: an early version of the Libera me, composed in 1869 as part of a collaborative work planned as a memorial to Rossini; and the Liber scriptus, which in the original score of the Manzoni memorial Requiem was composed as a fugue for chorus. The introduction to the score traces the complex compositional and performance histories of the Requiem and discusses the work’s problems of instrumentation and notation, while the critical commentary gives a full description of the sources and an account of all editorial decisions.
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Messa da Requiem for the Anniversary of the Death of Manzoni, 22 May 1874
Giuseppe Verdi Edited by David Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Messa da Requiem is the fourth work to be published in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. Following the strict requirements of the series, this edition is based on Verdi's autograph and other authentic sources, and has been reviewed by a distinguished editorial board—Philip Gossett (general editor), Julian Budden, Martin Chusid, Francesco Degrada, Ursula Günther, Giorgio Pestelli, and Pierluigi Petrobelli. It is available as a two-volume set: a full orchestral score and a critical commentary. The appendixes include two pieces from the compositional history of the Requiem: an early version of the Libera me, composed in 1869 as part of a collaborative work planned as a memorial to Rossini; and the Liber scriptus, which in the original score of the Manzoni memorial Requiem was composed as a fugue in G minor. The score, which has been beautifully bound and autographed, is printed on high-grade paper in an oversized format. The introduction to the score discusses the work's genesis, instrumentation, and problems of notation. The critical commentary, printed in a smaller format, discusses the editorial decisions and traces the complex compositional history of the Requiem.
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Mosè in Egitto
Azione tragico-sacra in Three Acts by Andrea Leone Tottola
Gioachino Rossini
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Gioachino Rossini's Mosè in Egitto is an opera that emerged from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian tradition of oratorios written to be performed during Lent. The three-act opera draws from the Biblical book of Exodus to chronicle the story of Moses liberating the Israelites from Pharaoh's rule and guiding them out of Egypt. The librettist, Andrea Leone Tottola, also borrowed from an eighteenth-century drama to add a love affair between Pharaoh's son and an Israelite girl that motivates Pharaoh's final, fatal refusal in the opera to free the Israelites.

This critical edition presents the version performed in 1820 after Rossini had revised the unsuccessful and now lost third act of 1818. The edition includes an appendix with the original aria for Pharaoh written by Michele Carafa, which was performed throughout the nineteenth century even after Rossini replaced it with one of his own. Also featured are vocal ornamentation used in Paris performances and detailed information on the Paris productions between 1822 and 1840. This comprehensive critical edition provides a reliable source for interpretation and study of a work that Rossini called "sublime."
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Motives for Allusion
Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music
Christopher Alan Reynolds
Harvard University Press, 2003

When a critic pointed out to Brahms that the finale theme in his First Symphony was remarkably similar to the Ode to Joy theme in Beethoven's Ninth, he is said to have replied: "Yes indeed, and what's really remarkable is that every jackass notices this at once." Not every musical borrowing is quite so obvious; but the listener who does perceive one is always left wondering: what does the similarity mean? In this illuminating book Christopher Reynolds gives us answers to that complex question.

Reynolds identifies specific borrowings or allusions in a wide range of nineteenth-century music. He shows the kinds of things composers do with borrowed musical ideas, and discusses why a composer would choose to deploy such allusions. A rich historical background for the practice emerges from his analysis. Musical borrowing touches directly on issues of central importance for nineteenth- and twentieth-century composition: notions of creativity and originality, the constraints of tradition and innovation, musical symbolism and the listener's ear. In clarifying what it can mean when one piece of music invokes or refers to another, Reynolds expands our understanding of what we hear.

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Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood
Adeline Mueller
University of Chicago Press, 2021

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s precocity is so familiar as to be taken for granted. In scholarship and popular culture, Mozart the Wunderkind is often seen as belonging to a category of childhood all by himself. But treating the young composer as an anomaly risks minimizing his impact. In this book, Adeline Mueller examines how Mozart shaped the social and cultural reevaluation of childhood during the Austrian Enlightenment. Whether in a juvenile sonata printed with his age on the title page, a concerto for a father and daughter, a lullaby, a musical dice game, or a mass for the consecration of an orphanage church, Mozart’s music and persona transformed attitudes toward children’s agency, intellectual capacity, relationships with family and friends, political and economic value, work, school, and leisure time.
 
Thousands of children across the Habsburg Monarchy were affected by the Salzburg prodigy and the idea he embodied: that childhood itself could be packaged, consumed, deployed, “performed”—in short, mediated—through music. This book builds upon a new understanding of the history of childhood as dynamic and reciprocal, rather than a mere projection or fantasy—as something mediated not just through texts, images, and objects but also through actions. Drawing on a range of evidence, from children’s periodicals to Habsburg court edicts and spurious Mozart prints, Mueller shows that while we need the history of childhood to help us understand Mozart, we also need Mozart to help us understand the history of childhood.

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Mozart
Studies of the Autograph Scores
Alan Tyson
Harvard University Press, 1987

The results and implications of Alan Tyson’s work on Mozart have had a profound impact on virtually every aspect of research on this composer: biography, chronology of compositions, working methods, stylistic analysis. Central, perhaps, are Tyson’s discoveries on chronology: time and again he has proved that datings, often of large, well-known works, that have been accepted for generations are not only erroneous but based on little more than speculation. This book assembles his major articles, previously scattered through magazines, journals, and festschrifts, plus two unpublished pieces, into a treasure trove for musicologists and music lovers.

Tyson’s investigations, using primarily paper analysis, span Mozart’s entire career and the full range of genres—string quartets, operas, choral music, keyboard music, concertos, and symphonies. He goes into the genesis of major works such as Cosi fan tutte, the “Prague” Symphony, the Piano Sonata K.333, the “Haydn” quartets, and La clemenza di Tito. His conclusions about chronology bear directly on biographical questions and current accounts of Mozart’s stylistic development as well as his compositional methods. We learn here, for example, that the “first” horn concerto was in fact Mozart’s last, and that he did not even complete the second movement, which was finished after his death by his pupil Süssmayr. The writing (and, in some cases, rewriting) of his later operas such as Figaro and Cosi fan tutte also lends itself to investigation by the same techniques; this is resulting in the rediscovery of some lost measures and little-known variant versions of arias.

Tyson’s style is clear and elegant, and the originality of his work and the soundness of his inferences make this book a pleasure.

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Mozart the Performer
Variations on the Showman's Art
Dorian Bandy
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An innovative study of the ways performance influenced Mozart’s compositional style.
 
We know Mozart as one of history’s greatest composers. But his contemporaries revered him as a multi-instrumentalist, a dazzling improviser, and the foremost keyboard virtuoso of his time. When he composed, it was often with a single aim in mind: to set the stage, quite literally, for compelling and captivating performances. He wrote piano concertos not with an eye to posterity but to give himself a repertoire with which to flaunt his keyboard wizardry before an awestruck public. The same was true of his sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and operas, all of which were painstakingly crafted to produce specific effects on those who played or heard them, amusing, stirring, and ravishing colleagues and consumers alike.

Mozart the Performer brings to life this elusive side of Mozart’s musicianship. Dorian Bandy traces the influence of showmanship on Mozart’s style, showing through detailed analysis and imaginative historical investigation how he conceived his works as a series of dramatic scripts. Mozart the Performer is a book for anyone who wishes to engage more deeply with Mozart’s artistry and legacy and understand why, centuries later, his music still captivates us.
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Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Thomas Mathiesen
University of Illinois Press, 2017
This essential summation of Palisca's life work was nearly finished by his death in 2001, and it was brought to completion by Thomas J. Mathiesen.
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Music and Imagination
Aaron Copland
Harvard University Press

One of the most forthright and talented of American composers writes here of the part played by the freely imaginative mind in composing, performing, and listening to music. He urges more frequent performance and more sensitive hearing of the music of new composers. He discusses sound media, new and old, and looks toward a musical future in which the timbres and intensities developed by the electronic engineer may find their musical shape and meaning. He considers the twentieth-century revolt against classical form and tonality, and the recent disturbing political interference with the form and content of music. He analyzes American and contemporary European music and the flowering of specifically Western imagination in Villa-Lobos and Charles Ives.

The final chapter is an account, partially autobiographical, of the composer who seeks to find, in an industrial society like that of the United States, justification for the life of art in the life about him. Mr. Copeland, whose spectacular success in arriving at a musical vernacular has brought him a wide audience, will acquire as many readers as he has listeners with this imaginatively written book.

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Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750
From the Priorate of the Guilds to the End of the Medici Grand Duchy
Anthony M. Cummings
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A comprehensive account of music in Florence from the late Middle Ages until the end of the Medici dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century. 

Florence is justly celebrated as one of the world’s most important cities. It enjoys mythic status and occupies an enviable place in the historical imagination. But its musico-historical importance is not as well understood as it should be. If Florence was the city of Dante, Michelangelo, and Galileo, it was also the birthplace of the madrigal, opera, and the piano. Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750 recounts Florence’s principal contributions to music and the history of how music was heard and cultivated in the city, from civic and religious institutions to private patronage and the academies. This book is an invaluable complement to studies of the art, literature, and political thought of the late-medieval and early-modern eras and the quasi-legendary figures in the Florentine cultural pantheon.
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Music Lessons
The Collège de France Lectures
Pierre Boulez
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Music Lessons marks the first publication in English of a groundbreaking group of writings by French composer Pierre Boulez, his yearly lectures prepared for the Collège de France between 1976 and 1995. The lectures presented here offer a sustained intellectual engagement with themes of creativity in music by a widely influential cultural figure, who has long been central to the conversation around contemporary music. In his essays Boulez explores, among other topics, the process through which a musical idea is realized in a full-fledged composition, the complementary roles of craft and inspiration, and the degree to which the memory of other musical works can influence and change the act of creation. Boulez also gives a penetrating account of problems in classical music that are still present today, such as the often crippling conservatism of established musical institutions. Woven into the discussion are stories of his own compositions and those of fellow composers whose work he championed, as both a critic and conductor: from Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Varèse, from Bartók to Berg, Debussy to Mahler and Wagner, and all the way back to Bach.

Including a foreword by famed semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who was for years a close collaborator and friend of the composer, this edition is also enriched by an illuminating preface by Jonathan Goldman. With a masterful translation retaining Boulez’s fierce convictions, cutting opinions, and signature wit, Music Lessons will be an essential and entertaining volume.
 
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Music of Death and New Creation
Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur
Michael B. Bakan
University of Chicago Press, 1999
For centuries the gamelan beleganjur percussion orchestra has been an indispensable part of political, social, and spiritual life on the island of Bali. Traditionally associated with warfare and rituals for the dead, the music has recently given rise to an exciting new musical style featured in contests that are attended by thousands. Ethnomusicologist Michael Bakan draws us into these intensely competitive events, in which political corruption, conflicting notions of identity, and irrepressible creativity rupture the smooth surface of cultural order.

Building from his own experiences as a beleganjur drummer, Bakan also takes us inside a distant musical world and into the lives of musicians connecting across vast cultural divides. Rich with musical examples, photographs, and an accompanying compact disc, Music of Death and New Creation is an unprecedented exploration of how music embodies and shapes life in contemporary Indonesia and beyond.
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Music's Monisms
Disarticulating Modernism
Daniel Albright
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Daniel Albright investigates musical phenomena through the lens of monism, the philosophical belief that things that appear to be two are actually one.
 
Daniel Albright was one of the preeminent scholars of musical and literary modernism, leaving behind a rich body of work before his untimely passing. In Music’s Monisms, he shows how musical and literary phenomena alike can be fruitfully investigated through the lens of monism, a philosophical conviction that does away with the binary structures we use to make sense of reality. Albright shows that despite music’s many binaries—diatonic vs. chromatic, major vs. minor, tonal vs. atonal—there is always a larger system at work that aims to reconcile tension and resolve conflict.
 
Albright identifies a “radical monism” in the work of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and musical works by Wagner, Debussy, Britten, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Radical monism insists on the interchangeability, even the sameness, of the basic dichotomies that govern our thinking and modes of organizing the universe. Through a series of close readings of musical and literary works, Albright advances powerful philosophical arguments that not only shed light on these specific figures but also on aesthetic experience in general. Music’s Monisms is a revelatory work by one of modernist studies’ most distinguished figures.
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Musique anodine--Album italiano
Gioachino Rossini
University of Chicago Press, 1996

During the last years of his life, Rossini gathered his numerous vocal and piano pieces into fourteen unpublished albums, which he called Pèchès de vieillesse ("sins of my old age"). In 1857 he presented Musique anodine, a Prélude and six songs, to his wife Olimpe, in gratitude for her care during his long illness. This was the thirteenth album in the series. The first was Album italiano, a dozen pieces for one, two, or four voices with piano. Among the best known of these pieces is "La regata veneziana," three canzonettas for mezzo-soprano in Venetian dialect, in which the heroine encourages her racing gondolier. Another song, "Le gittane," has never before been published with its Italian text.

Based on the composer's own manuscripts, this critical edition restores Rossini's expressively precise musical notation. Appendixes contain earlier versions of six songs, some with different texts from the final versions.

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Mysterious Mozart
Philippe Sollers, Translated and with an Introduction by Armine Kotin Mortimer
University of Illinois Press, 2010

Both a beguiling portrait of the artist and an idiosyncratic self-portrait of the author, Mysterious Mozart is Philippe Sollers's alternately oblique and searingly direct interpretation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's oeuvre and lasting mystique, audaciously reformulated for the postmodern age.

With a mix of slang, abstractions, quotations, first- and third-person narratives, and blunt opinion, French writer and critic Philippe Sollers taps into Mozart's playful correspondence and the lesser-known pieces of his enormous repertoire to analyze the popularity and public perceptions of his music. Detailing Mozart's drive to continue producing masterpieces even when saddled with debt and riddled with illness and anxiety, Sollers powerfully and meticulously analyzes Mozart's seven last great operas using a psychoanalytical approach to the characters' relationships.

As Sollers explores themes of constancy, prodigy, freedom, and religion, he offers up bits of his own history, revealing his affinity for the creative geniuses of the eighteenth century and a yearning to bring that era's utopian freedom to life in contemporary times. What emerges is an inimitable portrait of a man and a musician whose greatest gift is a quirky companionability, a warm and mysterious appeal that distinguishes Mozart from other great composers and is brilliantly echoed by Sollers's artful tangle of narrative.

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