Mozart, Marcia Davenport
Mozart, Marcia Davenport
List: $20.95 | Sale: $14.66
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Mozart

Author: Marcia Davenport

Narrator: Wanda McCaddon

Unabridged: 10 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/01/2011

Synopsis

Realistic, moving, engrossing, and positively brilliant, this biography recreates Mozart, the man and his music, against the background of the world he lived in. For Marcia Davenport, the research and writing of Mozart was truly a labor of love, during which she retraced every journey he made, saw every dwelling (then extant) in which he had ever lived, every theatre where his works were first performed, and every library and museum where his manuscripts were then to be seen. In this eloquent work of historical reconstruction, Davenport lets her characters tell their own stories. She builds from Mozarts infancy toward the climactic meeting in 1787 of Mozart, Lorenzo Da Ponte, and Casanova in Prague, when Don Giovanni was being written, to Mozarts tragically early death. The result is a biography of such commanding stature that it has remained unassailable since its publication in 1932.

About Marcia Davenport

Marcia Davenport (1903–1996) was an American author and music critic. She began her writing career on the editorial staff of the New Yorker before writing her first book, Mozart, the first published American biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. She went on to become a best selling novelist, and several of her books inspired movies starring some of Hollywood's top names.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mark on August 03, 2021

This book took me the better part of 40 years to read because I knew enough about Mozart to know he died in poverty at the age of 35. And while I also knew that he was performing before kings, queens, and emperors by the age of 6, knowing that he was buried in a pauper's grave led me to believe his......more

Goodreads review by Terrol on August 08, 2014

While I really enjoyed this book, I have a sneaking suspicion that it played fast and loose with Mozart's life. The writer, in an effort, I suppose, to make it more true-to-life and perhaps more enjoyable reading, wrote this in kind of a novel-ish way, embellishing all kinds of situations with chara......more

Goodreads review by Ellen on January 13, 2015

Wow. What an incredible book. I could begin rereading immediately! that she wrote this in 1932 and was a person familiar with Europe, the languages, the places of Mozart's life, makes it even better. This book should be required reading for every student of Music. It is all-encompassing and leaves t......more

Goodreads review by Mary on October 21, 2018

I recently re-watched the film "Amadeus," one of my favorites which I hadn't seen in over a decade, and immediately wanted to read an "authentic" biography of Wolfgang Amade Mozart (as he signed himself). Davenport's book, c. 1932, is consequently written in an older style than modern readers are ac......more

Goodreads review by James on January 18, 2016

This book is a very good biography. I like it because it does not romanticize the rumors or imagined stories told about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Instead, it reports facts about his life and tells a more "black and white" story about how he grew and lived his life. I do not mean to say it ignores fac......more

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