Mendelssohn has also taken charge of organizing centennial tributes to dead composers-Burgess's sly reference, presumably, to Hector Berlioz's quip that Mendelssohn was "a little too fond of the dead." As Mendelssohn/Burgess suggests, "in the sense that God can only be defined as God, so the music of Mozart can only be defined as music," and so Mendelssohn the Commemoration Tsar proposes, in recognition of Mozart's bicentenary, simply to perform "all the works." Since arriving in heaven, Beethoven has regained his hearing but developed an unfortunate habit of saying "Ach" at the start of every sentence, and Mendelssohn has converted back to Judaism. In 1991, the year of the bicentenary of Mozart's death, readers in search of something completely different about the Divine One might have picked up Anthony Burgess's On Mozart: A Paean for Wolfgang, which begins with a celestial dialogue between Ludwig van Beethoven and Felix Mendelssohn. Reviewed by Celia Applegate (Department of History, University of Rochester) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography.Ĭochrane. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
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