Jan Swafford's Mozart: A Celebration of Love and Legacy

JP@ NC: The book details the genius of Mozart and how at a very early age was writing incredible music. His father's influence is very important to the story.

United States on Sep 28, 2023

O'Clarinet: It is a well-written book, but the typeface is very small. I ended up also buying the Kindle version and am reading it on my PC.

United States on Aug 26, 2023

tom cantrell: I've only read the first 100 pages, but this is a riveting read. So much information
with intriguing detail that makes you want to keep reading at a leisurely pace.
This is not a fast page turner. It's too good.

United States on Jun 30, 2023

Mrs S T Barnett***: The best Mozart book we’ve ever come across. Years of a deep love of classical music. trips to the Wigmore Hall and to many opera houses …. this book gives as much pleasure. And I can’t think of a higher accolade.

United Kingdom on Mar 13, 2023

La bruja: Como los otros libros del autor. Esta muy bien documentado. Su lectura es un placer. Además de aprender sobre W A Mozart y su increíble música

Mexico on Feb 19, 2022

Amazon Customer: Book can be read for the story of the man in his time but also has a composer/conductor’s insight into how he composed each piece. Read the book for pleasure because Mozart is always delightful. Best biography on Mozart I have ever read.

Canada on Oct 27, 2021

graham w: Even though my lack of knowledge on classical music lies heavy with me, I found this a brilliant, beautiful and educational read. Mozart lived a very short life, but it was filled to the brim everyday he was well with such hard work and production of wonderful music. This book gave me a great insight into what it was to be a composer in this era.

United Kingdom on Oct 13, 2021

Jenny Carter: We have just finished reading “Mozart: The Reign of Love”. My husband read it out loud to me. It is the best work of non fiction we have ever read. It has taken several months to read (740 pages), but we both enjoyed reading it together very much. It brought the amazing and very funny personality of Mozart to life for us and explained with great precision how his music works. We often laughed aloud at things Mozart said and sometimes my husband was so moved by what Swafford writes he could scarcely read the words. We have loved every minute of reading it. Swafford is a composer and a musicologist, but his prose (once you get used to his occasionally American use of English) is some of the finest and most insightful we have ever read.

United Kingdom on Oct 02, 2021

asdasklda: This comprehensive, beautifully written biography is full of insights about Mozart’s life and music, classical music history, the process of music composition, then and now, and indeed all of life.

And yet it begins with an enigmatic statement -- that the depiction of Mozart as a poor and miserable genius is a myth created by biographers to add drama to a boring story. Swafford has “sympathy with those mythmakers” because who “wants to read about a happy man? We shall see.”

Do we? By page 350 of this 800 page biography, Mozart’s life is 2/3 over, and how has he lived it? Being paraded as a child and teenager throughout Europe by a scoundrel of a father who saw Mozart primarily as his meal ticket. During his only trip accompanied solely by his mother, he watched her die in a hotel room, age 57. His first true love was unacceptable to his father who ruined any potential of a relationship. His second attempt at marriage, to the sister of his first true love, was only accepted by his father in the most grudging and ungenerous way, and by the time Mozart had finally established himself in a new city away from his father and with some measure of independence,...

United States on Feb 20, 2021

Harris: First, let's get the biographical information corrected....Many years ago on the planet Krypton, Jorel and Lara placed their infant son on a spacecraft enabling it to escape the catastrophe about to consume their planet. Launching it into space without a GPS, it eventually landed in the small yet picture post card alpine village on Earth called Salzburg. Adopted by unsuspecting parents to be the child named Wolfgang at age 5 seemingly, without any musical training, jumped up on a piano bench and played yet unknown tunes which caused his father to exclaim..."He is a miracle." For the next 35 years and 11 months the lad continued to leap tall buildings at a single bound and enjoyed life like a speeding bullet. Really, could this all be true? Jan Swafford presents us with a different story however in 740 pages of action packed string quartets, operas, symphonies, piano concertos and other assorted musical bon bons all to prove a point that all of this has something to do with "Love." And he does so, convincingly. Building his story on the shoulders of such imminent music thinkers such as Maynard Solomon, Alfred Einstein, Volkmar Braunbehrens, Edward Dent, H.C. Robbins Landon and a...

United States on Jan 19, 2021