‘Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces’
By Patrick Mackie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 360 pages

Once upon a time biographies appeared without source notes. Biographers might very well allude to where they obtained their information, but no particular effort was made to anchor facts and sentences to page numbers or archival locations.  

Undocumented biographies implied that the biographer was the authority. A reader was supposed to capitulate to that proposition. Nowadays such biographies are rare because the very concept of authority has changed. What in one age was called “the authorities” on which writers and readers relied are now just “sources,” partaking of a lowlier, if still vital, status.

Patrick Mackie’s vibrant biography has something of the 18th-century dash and panache that he evokes in Mozart. This biographer/poet relies on his own voice more than is the habit of most biographers, and by relegating references to Mozart scholarship to just a few pages at the back of his book, he eschews the orchestral nature of modern biography as a sort of collective enterprise. 

Without even a bibliography, Maynard Solomon, Robert Gutman, Jan Swafford, and many other Mozart scholars and biographers are missing, though Otto Erich Deutsch’s monumental “Mozart: A Documentary Biography” is mentioned in the brief “Sources” section. 

In short, Mr. Mackie is a soloist who writes on a world stage with a sententiousness that made 18th-century biography seem not merely the story of another’s life, but a story that could only emanate from a singular voice that had something unique to tell us about the nature of the world that the biographical subject inhabited and shaped.

The strengths of this older tradition of pontifical biography are many, but they come with a certain presumption that startles the modern circumspect biographer. Here is Mr. Mackie’s wonderful evocation of the life and world that Mozart managed, but also an instructive example of a biographer who know less than he thinks, but thinks he knows more because of the voice and experience he brings to his subject and world:

“Someone who is often praised is often someone who is deeply alone.  Living up to praise can be one sort of shiny burden, and praise can be charged with premonitions of a time when it might vanish. It can sound insincere or focus on the wrong things or invoke hated rivals as reference points; it can finish too soon or extend to embarrassing lengths. Someone who is praised is normally being told what to be, or at least what to continue being, and also how important the person doing the praising is. Performing artists set up their lives as laboratory experiments in which the questions that teem around praise and recognition play out in expansive, brightly lit versions. Being praised had been a way of life for Mozart for a long time before the move to Vienna, and his work often sounds pleased by the praise that it is about to receive. So too this must have brought him sooner rather than later to some unusually high realism in assessing the meaning of praise.”

The highly praised Mr. Mackie, who may be writing an autobiography in disguise, is qualified to set himself beside Mozart, and to dilate on what praise might do to a genius, but then we get what praise “must have brought” the composer, and here we live in the imaginative world without source notes.

Other instances of the “must have” abound, but so, too, do brilliant discussions of Mozart’s music and personality with enticing chapter titles: “A Beautiful Revenge,” “The Lowly Viola,” “Musical Homelessness,” and “Unsure Fun,” to name just a few. Each chapter is devoted to a Mozart masterwork, which enlivens the conventional, chronological approach to biography. 

How this biography is situated in the universe of Mozart biography, you will not not discover. For many readers, though, Mr. Mackie’s dazzling insights will suffice.

Mr. Rollyson’s reviews of Mozart biographies have been published in the New York Sun (January 1, 2006) and the San Francisco Chronicle (December 10, 2020).