From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart's singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether

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As he's done in Napoleon, Churchill, Jesus, and Darwin, acclaimed historian and author Paul Johnson here offers a concise, illuminating biography of Mozart. Johnson's focus is on the music-Mozart's wondrous output of composition and his uncanny gift for instrumentation. Liszt once said that Mozart composed more bars than a trained copyist could write in a lifetime. Mozart's gift and skill with instruments was also remarkable as he mastered all of...

A documentary about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart told through dramatic readings from his personal letters. Includes interviews with noted personalities and excerpts from numerous musical performances.

Explores the life and work of the prolific eighteenth-century Austrian composer who began life as a child prodigy, composing music at the age of five, and died a pauper at age thirty-five.

"Although it was not always easy for musician Franz Schubert to practice his music, he was supported immensely by his friends, who believed in his talent and wanted the world to hear his work."-- "Franz Schubert was only eleven when he auditioned for the Emperor's Choir School in Vienna, a place where everyone loved music. Franz barely spoke a word, but he sang like an angel, and his friends took to calling him "Little Mushroom" because he was small....

"Despite the ups and downs of his personal life and professional career - even in the face of deafness - Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art. This inner consistency provides the key to understanding the composer's life and works more than 250 years after his birth in 1770. Beethoven approached music as he approached life, weighing from a variety of perspectives whatever occupied him: a melodic idea,...