Book cover for Mozart in Italy

Mozart in Italy

Synopsis

Details

05 October 2023
510 minutes
9781529059892
Imprint: Picador

Reviews

You don’t have to be able to hum Mozart to find this book utterly engrossing. As a fan of both the fabled composer and Dame Jane Glover, Mozart in Italy is a match made in heaven. I couldn’t put it down.
An account of the teenage Mozart’s operatic awakening is packed with humanising detail . . . [Glover] makes clear that Mozart lived very much in the real 18th-century world of dirt, illness, bedbugs and discomfort, not permanently wrapped in some fuzzy golden halo of brilliance.
Mozart in Italy is a fascinating account of classical music’s greatest failure – a story of promise unfulfilled, opportunities missed and roads not taken.
A fine conductor, Glover is also an accomplished writer, displaying, as in her earlier books, a nonchalant grace in marshalling her sources, reading cannily between their lines and taking care to provide proper historical context as the Mozarts zigzag over the chessboard of Italian princely states.