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Perhaps Grove editor Sadie gave himself more freedom than he gave his other contributors - because, while the bulk of the Handel and Haydn studies (Dean, Larsen, above) are given over to dry, factual biography, Sadie manages to devote over half of this Mozart profile to work-by-work discussions on a level never approached in the other books. The biographical data, then, is kept to a bare minimum here - though most controversial matters are commented upon (as for loose-living circa 1791, nothing more licentious than a fondness for billiards is reliably documented ); and Mozart veteran Sadie easily demonstrates that skepticism about Mozart legends was alive and well long before Wolfgang Hildesheimer's recent (p. 842) rumblings. His chief energy, however, goes to esthetic/technical commentaries on virtually all of Mozart's work - in chapters which alternate with the biographical episodes; even such a relatively minor opera as La finta semplice, for example, receives twice as much space as Dean's quick survey gives to Handel's Messiah. Sadie's analyses are lucid, convincing, sometimes even eloquent; his only slightly idiosyncratic touch is a strong rebuttal to those scholars who see a crucial embrace of the fugue form in the later work. ( To discover J. S. Bach's influence is to sentimentalize and to ascribe to Mozart 20th-century historical attitudes. ) And, as a result, this is by far the most valuable of the three initial entries in the Grove Composer Biography Series: with no real pretense to biography, it can serve well as a basic listening companion, while readers look to other Mozart books (e.g., most recently, Richard Baker's fine introduction) for a fuller sense of the life-story. (Kirkus Reviews)

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STANLEY SADIE has been Editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians since 1980. Editor of the first edition (1980), he was also editor of The Musical Times (1967-87) and a music critic for The Times (1964-81). He was President of the International Musicological Society from 1992-97. - JOHN TYRRELL is Executive Editor of The New Grove II. He worked with Stanley Sadie on both the first edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) and The Musical Times. In 1976 he was appointed lecturer in music at the University of Nottingham, becoming Reader in Opera Studies (1989) and Professor (1995). He is well known as an expert on Czech music, in particular that of Leos Janacek. His books include A Guide to International Congress Reports in Musicology (with Rosemary Dooley, 1979), Czech Music (1988), Janacek's Operas (1992) and the catalogue Janacek's Works (co-author, 1997). He has edited and translated Janacek's letters to Kamila Stosslova (1994) and the memoirs of Zdenka Janackova (1998), and with Sir Charles Mackerras has published authentic editions of Janacek's operas Jenufa and From the House of the Dead. - Authors - STANLEY SADIE has been Editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians since 1980. Editor of the first edition (1980), he was also editor of The Musical Times (1967-87) and a music critic for The Times (1964-81). He was President of the International Musicological Society from 1992-97. - CLIFF EISEN is reader in historical musicology at King's College, London. His research has focused on the Classical period, particularly Mozart, performing practice and 18th- and 19th-century chamber music. He is currently working on Mozart String Quintets .

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