Mozart: The Golden Years, 1781-91

London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. Very Good/Very Good. 1989. Hard Cover. 4to 0500014663 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. Ownership inscription on ffep. With 215 illustrations, 32 in colour, and 27 musical examples. 272 pages clean and tight. `If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music ... how inimitable are Mozart's works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive', wrote Joseph Haydn in 1787. To a large extent the world listened: at the summit of his career, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart enjoyed unprecedented popularity. The last decade of his short but amazingly prolific career must count as one of the most remarkable periods - truly golden years - in the entire history of Western music. Mozart: The Golden Years provides a vivid account of Mozart's life in the European music capital, Vienna. The first few years of this enormously creative yet turbulent time witnessed a crescendo of activity. Mozart married Constanze Weber in 1782, and in the ensuing years produced an astonishing wealth of new music, rich in quality as well as in quantity. He performed his own exquisite piano concertos at a series of subscription concerts, and composed the masterly `Linz' Symphony and the Mass in C Minor. Then in 1786 he wrote and staged Le nozze di Figaro - a high-point in his achievement. The last four years of Mozart's life saw the production of a host of immortal works, among them the great trilogy of symphonies (nos. 3941), more operatic masterpieces - Don Giovanni, Cosi Jan tulle, Die Zauberflole and La clemenza di Tito - and the Clarinet Concerto of 1791. Yet, behind these magnificent artistic successes lay Mozart's darker side: his recurring bouts of depression, as well as his constant financial straits - difficulties which underlie his most origin. .