Maynard Solomon - Mozart: A Life

Portions of this book formed the basis for the Messenger Lectures that I gave at Cornell University in the spring of 1992. Other sections were presented as lectures at Brandeis University, the University of California at Berkeley, Peabody Conservatory of Music, Princeton University, Rutgers University, Smith College, Stanford University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center, the Biography Seminar of the Department of English at New York University, the New York Institute for the Humanities, the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities at Yale University, and the Royal Musical Association in London. The Myth of the Eternal Child was initially presented as an Albert Schweitzer Lecture in the Humanities at New York University at the invitation of Aileen Ward, now Schweitzer Professor Emeritus, and was subsequently published in 19th-century Music 15 (1991). Chapter 18, here entitled Adam, appeared in the Festschrift for Georg Knepler, Zwischen Aufklrung and Kulturindustrie, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister et al. (Hamburg, 1993). A version of chapter 28, The Journey to Berlin, appeared in the Journal of Musicology (1994). Chapter 22, The Zoroastran Riddles, was written for a Mozart symposium at Rutgers University organized by Ellen Rosand and Douglas Johnson; it was published in American Imago 12 (1985) and is reprinted here, in revised form, by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

My thanks to the unfailingly helpful staff members of the music division of the New York Public Library, the libraries of Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton universities, and the sterreichische Nationalbibliothek. Also to the Berlin Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, the British Library, the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna, the Hunterian Art Gallery of the University of Glasgow, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Museen der Stadt Wien, and the Mozart-Archiv of the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg. Quotations from Emily Anderson, The Letters of Mozart and His Family , are used by permission of Macmillan Press Ltd. Photographs are by Maury Solomon. The reductions of the music examples were done by Scott Griffin and prepared for publication by Carl Johnson of Music Publishing Services, New York.

For materials, suggestions, collegial responses to queries, and exchanges of ideas, I am grateful to Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rudolph Angermller, Karol Berger, Bruce Cooper Clarke, Cliff Eisen, Joseph Kerman, William Kinderman, Richard Kramer, Lewis Lockwood, Robert L. Marshall, Josef Manal, Max Rudolf, the late Gert Schiff, Elaine Sisman, Leo Treitler, Alan Tyson, James Webster, Robert S. Winter, and Neal Zaslaw. I owe a great deal to the members of my Mozart seminars at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Columbia University, and Harvard University, where many of the chief ideas of this book were first elaborated. Professors Eisen, Kerman, Lockwood, Marshall, and Zaslaw all read the manuscript and made innumerable valuable suggestions for its improvement, sacrificing time from their own projects to assist a friend and colleague who now cannot find appropriate words to express his deep appreciation. I can only say that wherever possible I have gladly availed myself of their corrections, accepted their advice, and taken serious account of their objections. Perhaps a future edition will enable me to remedy any remaining errors of fact or infelicities of interpretation.