Literant.(Mozart by Julian Rushton)(Mozart: The Early Years 1756-1781 by Stanley Sadie)(Book review)

We are already halfway through 2006, the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The culture took brief heed, and then marched on unchanged. The operatic pimps-and-hos of Mozart's "The Abduction from the Seraglio" have hardly led Tupac fans to embrace real music and start buying pants that actually fit. Proponents of "historically informed performances" still battle fans of "living tradition performances" on catty classical-music discussion boards. Makers of atonal, minimalist, and other avant-garde music haven't come clean and admitted their work is mostly tripe. Tom Hulce, Oscar-nominated for his starring portrayal in Amadeus, still could probably use some new acting gigs.

To be sure, some good things have come out of Mozart's big anniversary. Many of the big record labels re-released some older CDs at lower prices. And there have been some good books published to mark the occasion. Two of the best are Mozart by Julian Rushton, and Mozart: The Early Years 1756-1781 by Stanley Sadie.

Rushton's book is for people smarter than me. An early warning sign was the number of musical notation charts it featured (I read music about as well as I read Sanskrit). The focus here is clearly on Mozart's work, not Mozart himself. Yet Rushton, a professor at the University of Leeds, does an admirable job of making his very detailed analysis of Mozart's music more or less understandable, even to those of us who couldn't learn the recorder in grammar school.

Right away I knew Sadie's book was more up my alley: less musical notation, more pictures. Don't get the wrong idea, though. This isn't some fluffy bio meant to be read at airports, but a 600-plus-page bit of fantastic scholarship by one of the greatest music writers of all time. The late Stanley Sadie, the ...