Between the ages of 13 and 17, Mozart made three trips to Italy, spending some two-and- a-half years in ‘the country at the heart of the opera world’. He would never return as an adult. His mature Italian operas – The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, La Clemenza di Tito – can be traced directly back to these formative teenage encounters and experiences in Bologna, Venice, Rome, Florence and Naples. So argues Jane Glover in Mozart in Italy.
A follow-up to 2005’s Mozart’s Women, the book is a lively account of journeys which the composer shared (mostly) with his father Leopold. What dominates initially is the business of 18th-century travel itself – something viewed very differently through the wide eyes of an eager young boy and the anxious gaze of his elderly tour manager-cum-PR-cum-chaperone parent.
Networking 18th-century style emerges as a game of
three-dimensional chess
Luckily letters home (Wolfgang’s mother and talented sister, Glover is quick to remind us, were perhaps resentfully and certainly unwillingly left behind in Salzburg) allow both to speak directly.
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