Letters

Here are letters to and from Mozart's domineering father, Leopold, the earliest of which, addressed to a friend, describes the six-year-old Mozart's accomplishments. There is also a letter sent to the Royal Society in London from one of its members describing an astonishing encounter with the eight-year-old prodigy. Here are letters from the adolescent Mozart to his mother and sister; adoring, protective missives to his wife; and, from his later years, letter after letter to friends, family, former patrons, and fellow musicians begging for financial help.
Mozart's correspondence is full of details that illuminate the quotidian aspects of his days, reveal the great joys and burdens of his musical genius, and provide us with a lively account of musical politics in the courts and opera houses of eighteenth-century Europe. Finally, in a letter written by Mozart's sister-in-law, this splendid epistolary portrait of the great composer is completed with a deeply moving account of his last hours.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and died in 1791.Michael Rose is the author of Berlioz Remembered and a contributor to the Grove dictionaries of music and opera.Peter Washington is the editor of several Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthologies, including Love Poems, Friendship Poems, and Poems ofMourning.