Mozart, sociologia de um gênio

"Using psychoanalytic insights, Elias examines Leopold Mozart's carefully honed ambitions for his son and protege. From the age of six Mozart traveled with his father, performing in the major courts throughout Europe, as the elder Mozart worked on his son "like a sculptor on his sculpture." This deep bond between father and son, which shackled as well as nurtured, provides the lietmotif of Mozart's early genius and the basis of his complicated psyche.".

"As Elias shows, Mozart chafed at the constraints of Viennese courtly culture. Growing up in a society which viewed musicians as manual laborers producing entertainment for the court, Mozart fought for an independent livelihood. But it was not until the next generation - that of Beethoven - that the necessary conditions were created for such an existence.

Vienna's aristocracy ultimately turned its back on the composer who, with mounting debts, no work and no prospect of fulfilling his innermost desires, died feeling that his life had become empty of meaning." "Elias intriguingly ponders the notion of genius, seen as a complex marriage of fantasy, inspiration, and convention. Mozart was able to fuse brilliant musical innovation to an accessible artistic canon, producing wholly original, yet understandable creations.".

"In exploring the tension between personal creativity and the tastes of an era, Mozart is a book of startling insight and discovery."—BOOK JACKET.