| Abstract |
The complex relationship between Mozart and his father has fascinated music lovers for centuries, and much effort has been spent examining the letters exchanged by the two men. This provocative book offers a new reading of these letters, placing them in the context of the stylised strategies of the eighteenth-century epistolary tradition and arguing that they reveal a rebelliousness deep within Mozart's life and work. The author contends that Mozart's father, Leopold, intended to write a biography of his son and designed his correspondence to be published as a type of moral biography. Mozart's letters, in contrast to the moral German-styled letters he received, came closer to the more wily French letters of the philosophes, Voltaire especially, whose style he would have discovered while living in Paris. Eventually Mozart turned the correspondence into an epistolary game, wilfully making his letters unprintable and deliberately subverting his father's plans. |
