MOZART

In his lifetime, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart didn''t have the best of luck with his patrons. One of them, Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg, actually had his chamberlain kick the composer in the ass to signal the end of his employment. Mozart has been luckier, however, with his biographers. In the last 20 years alone, he has been the subject of two fine books: Maynard Solomon''s meticulous study, which slides Mozart''s rather mystifying psyche under the analytic microscope, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer''s more sardonic effort, in which the author seems determined to strip every last bit of romantic varnish from the traditional portrait.
Now Peter Gay joins the party with his own brief life. Weighing in at 177 pages, Mozart will never displace its deep-focus predecessors. But it''s a delightful introduction to the composer, whose entire existence was, as Gay puts it, a triumph of genius over precociousness. It''s one thing, after all, to knock ''em dead at age five--at which point the waist-high Mozart was already a keyboard virtuoso. It''s quite another to keep developing at the same prodigious pace. A child prodigy is, by its nature, a self-destroying artifact: what seems literally marvelous in a boy will seem merely talented and perfectly natural in a young man. But by 1772, at sixteen, Mozart no longer needed to display himself as a little wizard; he had matured in the sonata and the symphony, the first kind of music he composed, and now showed his gifts in new domains: opera, the oratorio, and the earliest in a string of superb piano concertos.