6/28/2023 0 Comments Mozart by Robert W. Gutman“Someone who is often praised is often someone who is deeply alone. Mackie’s wonderful evocation of the life and world that Mozart managed, but also an instructive example of a biographer who know less than he thinks, but thinks he knows more because of the voice and experience he brings to his subject and world: The strengths of this older tradition of pontifical biography are many, but they come with a certain presumption that startles the modern circumspect biographer. Mackie is a soloist who writes on a world stage with a sententiousness that made 18th-century biography seem not merely the story of another’s life, but a story that could only emanate from a singular voice that had something unique to tell us about the nature of the world that the biographical subject inhabited and shaped. Without even a bibliography, Maynard Solomon, Robert Gutman, Jan Swafford, and many other Mozart scholars and biographers are missing, though Otto Erich Deutsch’s monumental “Mozart: A Documentary Biography” is mentioned in the brief “Sources” section. This biographer/poet relies on his own voice more than is the habit of most biographers, and by relegating references to Mozart scholarship to just a few pages at the back of his book, he eschews the orchestral nature of modern biography as a sort of collective enterprise. Patrick Mackie’s vibrant biography has something of the 18th-century dash and panache that he evokes in Mozart.
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