Amadeus

Because we already have several reliable lives of Mozart, a new biography must establish a niche for itself to justify its existence. Investigating some hitherto undiscovered materials, letter or manuscript of a composition seems more or less out of the question. We must continue to work with what we have. Hence, a new life of Mozart must draw on its style, its interpretation of his world or its readings of the music to establish its originality.

Subtitling his latest book “A Cultural Biography,” Robert W. Gutman claims an impressive raison d’e^tre for his life of Mozart, painting a large, lavish and crowded canvas that thoroughly explores the wider world in which Mozart lived and worked. This treatment, moving away from, say, Stanley Sadie’s “The New Grove Mozart,” which sticks closely to the evolution of Mozart’s music, is inviting, even seductive. There is something generous about placing great composers in their widest possible contexts, not just showing them as sons and brothers or wunderkinds surpassing all other prodigies but also illuminating the tenuous existence of 18th century composers and performers--such as Mozart’s father Leopold, who was both--in a court environment in which they were considered little better than menial servants.

Gutman does more: He examines Mozart’s patrons, whether mean-spirited or munificent, most of them aristocrats who were competent violinists or pianists; he spells out the conditions under which Mozart toiled under the archbishop who ruled Salzburg.

Gutman’s well-known earlier biography, “Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music” (1968), was a widely debated take-no-prisoners biography that infuriated the impassioned fan club of the Master of Bayreuth with its undisguised antipathy to Wagner’s character. Just to leave no doubt about Gutman’s convictions, the illustrations in that book included a photograph of two Wagner grandchildren welcoming Hitler to the Bayreuth Festival. (I hasten to confess that I had no problem with his devastating verdicts about Wagner the man.)

Though Gutman now is writing about a composer he loves rather than one he loathes, his emphasis on culture is no less intensive. In a densely packed text of more than 800 pages, sprinkled with lengthy, often highly informative footnotes, he takes occasion to describe Salzburg, Mozart’s native town, and his parents’ background; his first “grand tour” to Paris, London, the Netherlands and the capitals of small German states; particulars about the Seven Years’ War; Mozart’s second visit to Paris, shadowed by the death of his mother, who had accompanied him; and much, much more. At times, Gutman seems to be presenting adiary covering almost every day. There is, in short, everything in this book a reader could conceivably want to know about Mozart’s age, although at times the minutiae swamp the music.

Gutman’s affection for these minutiae--the wars and regimes and codes of dress--suggests a certain indecision about what public he means to address: the reader who wants to know about history or the one who wants to know about music. The former seems to be winning throughout. Not that Gutman neglects the music altogether, but he gives too little space to the last 10 years of Mozart’s life, 1781 to 1791, which the composer spent in defiance of his father in Vienna, the years that brought him immortality as a composer unsurpassed, even unequally, in his versatility.

If Mozart had died just before moving to Vienna, he would have been a composer of note, with an assured place in the history of music. But we would not have had (and this is only a partial list) the three Lorenzo da Ponte operas: “Le nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi fan tutte,” and the last eight and finest of his symphonies, including the “Prague” and the “Jupiter.” We also would have been bereft of 19 of his 27 piano concertos, half a dozen of which rank among the most magnificent things he wrote; five of his six utterly absorbing string quintets, moving examples of a Mozart at the other extreme from his charming “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” I must go on: We would not have had 11 of his string quartets, including the six he dedicated to Haydn, to say nothing of the “Requiem.” Yet Gutman allocates to this rich decade less than a third of his space.

A comparison with Maynard Solomon’s superb “Mozart: A Life” (1995) is instructive: Solomon devotes more than half of his biography to Mozart’s Vienna years. A close look at Solomon’s biography shows another, rather subtler advantage over the book under review: its psychological sophistication. Like all other biographers, Gutman finds much to say about Leopold Mozart. There is nothing astonishing about this: The man’s presence is simply inescapable. After all, he was his son’s teacher, booster, critic, chronicler, impresario, devotee--and, in some measure, his nemesis.

If Mozart was a genius as a composer, his father was a genius at manipulating his son. No one was more expert than Leopold Mozart at holding other people responsible for his own mistakes; no one was better at converting egotism into indignation; no one was more adept at advancing claims to his son’s attention, even subservience, to which he was not entitled. And that meant that no one better than his father could make Mozart feel more miserable, more guilty--particularly about offenses he had not committed.

Gutman captures some of this, but the finer points escape him. Late in 1780, Mozart was in Munich, composing and superintending his opera sepia “Idomeneo.” His father was back in Salzburg, giving advice (often good advice) and hectoring his son as usual. “Mozart’s letters home,” Gutman writes, “reflect complete self-possession.” When “a whining wind begins to blow across Leopold’s pages, Mozart makes clear that he will tolerate none of the old tricks.”

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As Gutman sees it, “Leopold could no longer oppress, neither could he nourish and reassure.” But, as Solomon leaves no doubt, though Leopold Mozart could no longer nourish and reassure his son, there was one thing he could still do: oppress him. Mozart’s inability to satisfy his father, to win--even as an adult--a certain independence from him and to get his father’s blessing for his marriage and affection for his two surviving children haunted Mozart no matter how famous he became.

And when Leopold died in 1787, his impact on his son did not drop away; the intermittent depressions, the moments of despair that Mozart had begun to suffer after he found himself unable to disregard his father’s reproaches and demands continued to trouble him. In its own way, Gutman’s new biography is a success: Mozart’s world has rarely been described so fully. But for balanced treatment and for psychological penetration, Solomon’s “Mozart” remains the life of choice.