Book description
David Cairns weaves a brilliantly engaging narrative which puts
Mozart's operas in the context of his life, showing how they illuminate
his creativity as a whole. Mozart's unusual childhood as a musical
prodigy touring Europe as a performer from an early age is well known.
But even more remarkable is that the genius grew up, surviving his
unnatural early years and producing works of increasing maturity and
originality. Using the operas as his guide, Cairns traces the steady
deepening of Mozart's musical style from his beginnings as a child
prodigy, through his coming of age with what Cairns sees as the most
Romantic and forward-looking of all Mozart's operas, Idomeneo, the later
genius displayed in the three comic operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don
Giovanni, and Cos fan tutte, and in The Magic Flute, the final and
greatest triumph of his career. David Cairns has been chief music
critic of the Sunday Times and music critic and arts editor of the
Spectator. He has also written for the Evening Standard, the Financial
Times and the New Statesman. He has been Distinguished Visiting
Professor at the University of California, a visiting scholar at the
Getty Center in Santa Monica, and a visiting fellow of Merton College,
Oxford. His two-volume biography of Berlioz won the Whitbread Biography
Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the Yorkshire Post Book
of the Year and the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize.
