Читать книгу The Mozarts, Who They Were (Volume 1) - Diego Minoia - Страница 3

Introduction

Why this book? Because it has never been written! For years, I had been looking for a book about the Mozart family with these characteristics. Having never found one, as an author of several books, I decided to write it. There are dozens of books published on Mozart; some are biographies of Amadeus, others are detailed and technical musical analysis' of his compositions, and a few are a blend of biographical and musical analysis.

This book is different from all the others, as the reader will realize from the first pages. To begin with, we will be talking about the entire Mozart family, not just Wolfgang. There is no musical analysis of the compositions and the biography was written principally from information drawn from the most direct and reliable source: the Mozartian epistolary. It is rich in subject matter that is not present in other publications on the Mozarts: information about the epoch in which they lived, their way of thinking and living, interesting facts about events and situations of which they were the protagonists, et cetera.

The objective of this labor of love is to offer a new instrument, less specialistic and certainly not musicological, but with a wealth of information, extracting acquired facts that will allow us to completely lose ourselves in the way of life of the mid to late 1700s.

I hope that I have been successful in personifying the Mozarts without downplaying the individual. My aim is to display the evidence with the simplicity and clarity of my decades of interest in Amadeus, Leopold, Nannerl and the thousands of characters in which they came into contact.

Right from the beginning, my intention was to write a book that would be interesting and pleasurable to read with ease and entertainment for musicians - who don't always find informative and specialized publications of detailed study which offers a better understanding of the context in which Mozart lived - as well as for music lovers, who will become acquainted with Mozart as a human, rather than the Salzburg "genius" high on his pedestal, as is often the case.

All will be discussed without the long digressions of a "critique", but rather with the affinity and affection of which the Mozarts are deserving. What they contributed to mankind far outweighs what they received in return.

I will tell you what the Mozarts were truly like, how they lived and how they thought during the 18^th century, with the addition of interesting facts relative to situations or matters where they are pertinent to the reader related to the Mozarts in Salzburg, while they were on their "European Tour" and during the three times they traveled to their beloved Italy.

In Volume I, we will be looking at the period dating from 1747 -- 1775. Nearly thirty years that consisted of the formation of the Mozart family; the birth of their children, the early sojourns from Salzburg that served to introduce the child prodigies to society, the Grand European Tour, the three journeys to Italy and the final attempts in Vienna and Munich by Wolfgang, accompanied by his father.

After this period, Amadeus traveled alone, with the exception of a brief initial journey with his mother between Munich and Paris, where she died. He then relocated definitively to Vienna, where he married, concluding his artistic and human parabola in 1791. As a result, the period following 1777, Amadeus returned to a new phase of his life that went beyond his range, which we will talk about in the next volume.

The reader who is interested in this book can choose, based on his or her preference, between the e-book version or the printed hardcopy, both available in two separate volumes.