Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces

Author(s): Patrick Mackie

Music | Biography and Memoir

The music and life of one of modernity's most prevalent figures through the compositions that shaped him, from a dazzling new writer of non-fiction.


Mozart holds a central, unwavering place in our culture, and his works are widely loved and listened to, often as much-loved favourites, or as background music. But how much do we really hear and understand the music that is played, and what can it reveal to us of the great composer?

Mozart in Motion is a unique biography of Mozart's music, a journey through the pieces of his canon which leads us to the pleasures of the works and an understanding of why they move us so intensely, as well as into the major and lesser known moments of Mozart's life. One reason Mozart's works have remained so ubiquitous, Mackie argues, is that he was composing at precisely the moment when our modern world was forming, and his priorities, explorations and emphases speak to our contemporary world.

In exhilarating, fresh and transformative prose, Patrick Mackie takes us inside the vital experience of listening to Mozart's music to uncover new perspectives on Mozart's world and the ways that we live now.

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An exhilarating and stimulating new survey of one of our civilization's greatest creative figures. Mackie sheds new light on both Mozart's music and his motivation, with an often piercingly original sideways glance - typically, Mackie ends his molto allegro romp through the works not with Mozart's famous unfinished Requiem but with a tiny keyboard Gigue that sums up his genius -- Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director, Barbican Centre
This book is like a set of virtuoso cadenzas on themes from Mozart's life and works: improvisatory, thought-provoking, quirky and constantly inventive -- Stephen Hough
A dazzling celebration and recalibration of Mozart's genius, written with an energy to match its subject -- Ian Bostridge, author of Schubert's Winter Journey
Written with the kind of energy and inventiveness of its subject, Mozart in Motion brings Mozart and his milieu into focus in a startling and original way. At once vividly evocative and dazzlingly informative and informed, this book changes the way we think about how art works, and how writing about art should work -- Adam Phillips
As "kaleidoscopic" as the composer's own genius... an immersive and thought-provoking experience that will send you back to Mozart's oeuvre with a renewed appetite * Financial Times *
Some sections flare into flame... he brings into vivid life the decadence of 18th-century Paris as it slides towards the Revolution... this book is as much about literary virtuosity as anything else * BBC Music Magazine *
A brilliant whirlwind of a book that makes us listen to Mozart's music in new ways and brings new ideas about the enlightenment, modernity, the rococo, Goethe, Kant, Prince -- Lara Feigel, Books of the Year * White Review *
Patrick Mackie's book places us firmly in [a] new world, and that's the best part of it - a feeling of looking over Mozart's shoulder * TLS *
[Mackie's] sentences sizzle and explode from the page like an elaborate firework display... Luminous * Morning Star *

 

 

Author Biography: Patrick Mackie is a published poet with Carcarnet and CB Editions and was a visiting fellow at Harvard.

Promotional Information: The music and life of one of modernity's most prevalent figures through the compositions that shaped him, from a dazzling new writer of non-fiction.

General Fields

  • : 9781783785995
  • : Granta
  • : Granta
  • : 01 November 2021
  • : {"length"=>["23.4"], "width"=>["15.6"], "units"=>["Centimeters"]}
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Patrick Mackie
  • : Hardback
  • : English
  • : 780.92