Overview

An innovative study of the ways performance influenced Mozart’s compositional style.   We know Mozart as one of history’s greatest composers. But his contemporaries revered him as a multi-instrumentalist, a dazzling improviser, and the foremost keyboard virtuoso of his time. He did some composing as well, often with a single aim in mind: to set the stage, quite literally, for compelling and captivating performances. He wrote piano concertos not with an eye to posterity, but to give himself a repertoire with which to flaunt his keyboard wizardry before an awe-struck public. The same was true of his sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and operas, all of which were painstakingly crafted to produce specific effects on those who played or heard them: to amuse, stir, and ravish colleagues and consumers alike. Mozart the Performer brings to life this elusive side of Mozart’s musicianship. Dorian Bandy traces the influence of showmanship on Mozart’s style, showing through detailed analysis and imaginative historical investigation how he conceived his works as a series of dramatic scripts. Mozart the Performer is a book for anyone who wishes to engage more deeply with Mozart’s artistry and legacy—who wants to understand why, centuries later, his music still captivates us.

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9780226828558

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Reviews

“Mozart the Performer offers a genuinely new way to process Mozart’s music, one that answers to a widely varied range of evidence at once musical, historical, and biographical. It constitutes a bold attempt to reimagine Mozart’s creative process—particularly as that of a self-conscious performer, an ‘inveterate showman’ playing to an audience—and to draw extensive interpretive conclusions from that reimagining.” * Scott Burnham, the Graduate Center, City University of New York * “Mozart the Performer is a fresh attempt to demythologize Mozart, to ground his creativity in real-world experiences and concerns, as opposed to the image of a ‘divine’ composer, the beauty of whose music somehow floats above mundane explication. Mozart the Performer is a striking expansion of scholarly horizons.” * W. Dean Sutcliffe, University of Auckland *

Author Information

Dorian Bandy is associate professor of musicology and historical performance at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music.

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