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Mozart: The First Biography (review)

by recent Mozart scholarship. Nevertheless, Melograni does present an interesting perspective on some aspects of Mozart’s life, notably his early career. He begins with the Mozart children’s first public concerts in London, when the two young prodigies were paraded at an inn near St Paul’s Cathedral. Here, anyone with the money could come between noon and three in the afternoon and hear the feats that had dazzled the courts of Europe. Melograni argues that this was not only a sign of the new entrepreneurial world that was to dominate Mozart’s later career, but also that it marked the start of the decline in the esteem in which the family was held by aristocracy and royalty. The nobility would have been outraged by this presumptuous behaviour, and indignant that the family did not know their place, eschewing patronage in favour of direct commercialism. Mozart’s reputation was not helped by the fiasco surrounding La finta semplice in Vienna three years later. Leopold Mozart’s response to the hostility of the Viennese musical establishment to this operatic effort by his 12-year-old son was to write a petition to the emperor Joseph II. This inappropriate behaviour further marked out the family as troublesome, may have led to his snubbing by the royal family in Naples, and resulted in the empress MariaTeresa’s famous letter to her son, Archduke Ferdinand, warning him not to take Mozart into his service. Melograni’s description of Mozart’s adolescence vividly brings out the envy that his sister and mother must have felt as he travelled through Italy with his father. In his letters home, Leopold alternated tales of excitement and luxury with feeble attempts to portray the country as dangerous and the journey as uncomfortable and hazardous. Later, Melograni argues that much of the conflict that developed between father and son arose because of Leopold’s objections to the directions in which Mozart’s style was leading, since he firmly believed that success and security could only come from writing accessible music in a popular style. Unfortunately, the depiction of Mozart’s adulthood is much less insightful. For a book about Mozart’s life and times, this biography is remarkably thin on setting the social context. We learn very little about the patrons and audiences for whom Mozart worked, the political context of Joseph II’s reign, and the early stages of the French revolution, or about Mozart’s working life or interests. Little is said about his social activities either, except for a silly section in which all the women for whom Mozart ever showed any affection or interest are listed, and the author speculates about whether they were lovers. So although Melograni has written an accessible and reasonably accurate biography of the composer, it does not stand out in this competitive field.