Mozart in Motion, Patrick Mackie
Mozart in Motion, Patrick Mackie
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Mozart in Motion
His Work and His World in Pieces

Author: Patrick Mackie

Narrator: Julian Elfer

Unabridged: 13 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/29/2023


Synopsis

Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand of his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer?

Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death; from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments; from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the listener through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer's life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship.

In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart's music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today, as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being.

About Patrick Mackie

Patrick Mackie is a poet whose work has appeared in the White Review, New Statesman, and the Paris Review. A former visiting fellow at Harvard, he is the author of Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Peyton on September 29, 2021

I hesitate to comment upon Mozart, whose music has been a love since I was a child, but I will say that Patrick Mackie delivers a deep understanding of his subject's life. I read this book with joy. If you thought that the movie Amadeus told you the whole story, then look again. There was more to hi......more

Goodreads review by Bagus on October 16, 2021

This book commented on an interesting aspect of Mozart’s life, that is his movements between several cities in Europe that specifically highlight the periods when Mozart lived in Salzburg, Paris, and back to Vienna. In a style that mix biography with musicological analysis on Mozart’s music, Patrick......more

Goodreads review by Dan on May 12, 2023

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of this look at a composer, his life, his problems, and of course the music. Most of my knowledge about the composer Mozart probably comes from the Academy Award winning film Amadeus, which I saw as a child o......more

Goodreads review by Will on December 12, 2023

A great antidote to the fictionalized Mozart who amused us in "Amadeus." In voluptuous prose, poet author Mackie uncovers the poetry and structure in Mozart's music, but beyond that brings out Mozart the human--energetic, leading a frenzied life, obsessed with many things even though music was at th......more

Goodreads review by Courtney on September 17, 2024

I wanted to love this. It was well-written and some parts were interesting. But there were many things wrong with it. First of all, it expects me to know things about Mozart that I didn't. Second, it uses vocabulary that isn't unintelligible but it is dense at best. And finally, it focuses more on o......more