At The New Yorker, Alex Ross writes about Mozart, the man and the music. He listened to it all — in order. Fans of Mozart (and if you’re not, shame on you) should read the whole article. I liked this little bit:
Ambitious parents who are currently playing the “Baby Mozart” video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard, and, if Constanze was right, by working himself to death.
In 1991, the Philips label issued a deluxe, complete Mozart edition—a hundred and eighty CDs—employing such distinguished interpreters as Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, and Colin Davis. The set has now been reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. During a slow week last winter, I transferred it to an iPod and discovered that Mozart requires 9.77 gigabytes.
And this:
In the unimaginable alternate universe in which he lived to the age of seventy, an anniversary-year essay might have contained a sentence such as this: “Opera houses focus on the great works of Mozart’s maturity—‘The Tempest,’ ‘Hamlet,’ the two-part ‘Faust’—but it would be a good thing if we occasionally heard that flawed yet lively work of his youth, ‘Don Giovanni.’”