It’s the best book about one of the greatest composers. I’ve devoted odd moments of this autumn and winter to absorbed intake of Hermann Abert’s Mozart and am lost in admiration for its achievement, simultaneous with renewed wonder and delight at the achievements of its subject.
Though regrettable that this classic (it finally appeared in German between 1919 and 1921) has had to wait till now for a complete translation, there are compensating gains. Notably in the comprehensive updating, via hundreds of footnotes incorporating almost 90 years’ worth of further discoveries, biographical and textual. The scholarly task of modernising the annotations has been magnificently discharged by Cliff Eisen of King’s College London, and the vast task of actual Englishing is accomplished by the indefatigable Stewart Spencer (better known for editing and translating Wagneriana). It reads with elegant fluency, and there’s a lightness of touch that I suspect the original might not always possess.
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