The Mozart Essays

In The Mozart Essays, the renowned musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon, author of the internationally acclaimed 1791: Mozart's Last Year and Mozart: The Golden Years, and editor of The Mozart Compendium, brings together a selection of his most authoritative essays and articles on the composer. These illuminating texts include examples of his earlier writings, now fully revised, and several newly written essays, published here for the first time. Together they provide an impressive range of insights into many aspects of Mozart's career.
In the previously unpublished essays Robbins Landon examines the incidental music to Thamos, Konig in Agypten (K.345), composed in the 1770s; presents a general survey of Mozart's church music, most of which was written in Salzburg in the early part of his career; and analyzes the documentary evidence relating to the decline in Mozart's fortunes, both legal and financial, towards the end of his life. The previously published material provides equally stimulating perspectives from which to study the music: for example, the composition of Mozart's first mature opera, Idomeneo, re di Creta, is reviewed through an examination of the composer's correspondence with his father, while Die Zauberflote is surveyed in the context of his relations with Freemasonry and with his librettist Emanuel Schikaneder. Also included are a chronological survey of the symphonies and a revealing analysis of the role of former pupils in the process of completing the most discussed work of Mozart's last year - the Requiem.