He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped.

When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.īorn and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. One month music’s supreme genius was a healthy and productive 34-year-old the next month, as it happened, he was dead. And surprisingly, his austere demystification of the most overly dramatized episodes in Mozart’s life – the anonymous late commission of a Requiem Mass, his purported poisoning – imbue its end with even greater poignancy: fate and conspiracy are easier to assimilate than bad luck and incompetent doctors. Leopold to Wolfgang, 1778: “You must with all your soul think of your parents’ welfare, otherwise your soul will go to the devil.” In general, Gay’s analysis of the orchestral music suffers from the effusion and imprecision of the amateur: “The dissonances and chromatic shifts Mozart so brilliantly deployed provided his astonished listeners with moments of simple poignancy or sheer delight…To experience them is to enjoy a spectacle of energy translated into beauty.” But he fares better with the operas, which are clearly his passion. He tries to remain evenhanded in treating the vexed subject of Mozart’s authoritarian father, but judicious citation does all the editorializing he needs. But the few excerpts from Mozart’s notoriously bawdy and scatological correspondence explode through Gay’s measured academic prose like a carnival at a Mass.

That may be unavoidable, given the amount of information it has to convey in so brief a span. The worst that can be said is that it’s dry. Gay’s aim seems to be the application of a scholar’s circumspection to the Mozart myth, and the best that can be said of the book is that it establishes historical context with the efficiency so compressed a format demands.

In the ‘60s, Yale historian Gay won a National Book Award for a history of the Enlightenment for the third installment of the Penguin Lives he depicts the lightning career of its greatest musical mind.

Mozart by peter gay