An entertaining if far-fetched might-have-been featuring a richly textured portrait of musical genius.
Summers’ speculative novel imagines: What if Mozart had not died at the age of 35?
Framed as a memoir written in 1823, the narrative begins in 1791 with the composer, sick with fever in Vienna, having his life mysteriously saved by a Romani woman. Mozart duly resumes churning out symphonies and hit operas while developing a love-hate rivalry with the young Ludwig van Beethoven. In 1799, he moves to London to be King George III’s court composer, whereupon his wife, Konstanze, leaves him; she reveals that she’s acquired a venereal disease from another man and passed it on to her husband. Mozart arrives at court but is fired when one of his concerts exacerbates the King’s madness. He then sets sail for America, but unwittingly books passage on a slave-trading ship and is emotionally traumatized by the atrocities he sees (“I screamed continually for the beating to stop…. My own spirit felt like I was receiving the lash”). Arriving in New York, he gets support from wealthy music lover John Jacob Astor, who builds him an opera house. Even better, he falls in love with Astor’s servant, Alice, a Black woman who turns out to be a great soprano; she bears him a son, but racist social mores (and the fact that he’s already married) prevent them from marrying. Mozart keeps fighting for racial justice—he spars with Thomas Jefferson over the immorality of slavery and receives racist death threats after he casts Alice and another Black singer in an opera.
The author is a pianist, conductor, and the artistic and music director of Houston Grand Opera. His ruminative yarn ranges luxuriantly over every aspect of Mozart’s life, from his fraught relationship with his father, Leopold, to his prodigious output—he writes six symphonies in a few weeks—to the carping of singers and clarinetists who complain that his music is too difficult. Mozart the showman would love the melodramatic plot, but the downside is that historical figures sometimes act markedly out of character (it’s hard to believe that the arrogant Beethoven would ever ask for Mozart’s help with his compositions), and the period details are sometimes wildly off (Summers has Mozart’s ship sailing 3,000 miles from Liverpool to West Africa in four days and has President Jefferson say, “We do not even have a national bank yet!” at a time when the United States had a national bank). But Summers’ depiction of Mozart, with his mix of vulgarity and sensitivity, is shrewd and well drawn, and the author gives him elegant, penetrating psychological insights. (“You were in a constant state of waiting,” he muses of Leopold, who relentlessly choreographed his early career, “like an alchemist who has put all of his elements together but had yet to know their outcome—you waited, always, for gold.”) Summers’ prose is especially pithy and evocative in conveying Mozart’s spot-on musical perceptions: “Staring at the score of Ludwig’s cantata, I thought his music was screaming at God, when composers should let God speak through them. [His] music was just too much of everything. Too much emotion. Too many contrasts.” Mozart fans—and even Beethoven partisans—will find much to relish here.
An entertaining if far-fetched might-have-been featuring a richly textured portrait of musical genius.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798987602317
Page Count: 578
Publisher: Contenti Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and open-minded account from Flemish journalist Joris of her venture into Zaire, formerly called the Congo, the infamous inspiration for Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As a child, Joris heard the tales told by her uncle, a Belgian missionary serving in the Congo. His visits were family milestones and the curios and gifts he sent back to Belgium became treasured heirlooms. But Joris the adult journalist wanted not only to follow in her uncle's footsteps but to see for herself what contemporary Zaire was like. A subtext here is a retrospective look at Belgian colonialism, notorious for its tragic failure to prepare the Congolese for independence, which, when it occurred, resulted in immediate chaos that led to the subsequent rise of Mobutu Sese Seko (president since 1965) and the ``Barons,'' who have brazenly used the country's great mineral wealth to enrich themselves. Joris first visits her uncle's old mission postings, where she meets his now-aging colleagues and learns that the Church is still one of the few ways out of poverty for bright young men, though many local churches and schools are closed down for lack of money. This poverty is a common theme of Congolese life, Joris learns, as she balances encounters with white expatriates with an excursion on the aging steamer that plies the Congo River from Kinshasa to Kisangani; a visit to Gbadolite, Mobutu's own Versailles; a trip to the southern mining province of Shaba, which in 1977 rebelled against Mobutu; and, on the lighter side but no less instructive, evenings in Maton, the famous entertainment district of Kinshasa. A deliberately impressionistic rather than definitive account, with Joris's perceptive insights and palpable sympathies for a long-suffering people making it more than just another travel book.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1992
ISBN: 0-689-12164-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
The rigors of Irish monasticism in the medieval period, well told by travel writer Moorhouse (On the Other Side, 1991; Hell's Foundations, 1992; etc.). The first half of the book is an imaginative reconstruction of life in an Irish monastery on the secluded rock-island of Skellig Michael from its founding in 588 to its dissolution in 1222. Moorhouse uses fictional vignettes to enliven the text. Each chapter is a well-chosen window onto a significant figure or event in the monastery's history—an 824 attack by Viking raiders, for example. In these fictional glimpses, we see the larger picture of Irish monasticism's evolution from a rigorously austere island faith to a less zealous, Romanized religion. Skellig Michael, perilously located on a sheer cliff rising from the ocean, began as one of the most ascetic of the Irish monasteries. Gradually, however, the population of monks began to dwindle, and the last fictionalized chapter shows the abbot and his aging disciples rowing their way back to the security of the mainland. The first half of the book is so intriguing and beautifully written that the second, a more traditional historical treatment of Irish monasticism, arranged topically, pales by comparison. Some of the discussions are absorbing, though; in one instance, Moorhouse explores the theme of syncretism, arguing that early Irish Catholicism, rather than eradicating pagan Celtic rituals, incorporated them into monastic life. This eclectic borrowing was able to continue for centuries because of Ireland's geographical remoteness from the centralizing forces of Rome. Due to accommodation with a Celtic spring ritual, Easter was dated differently than in Rome, a discrepancy that continued until Rome demanded conformity in the early 8th century. An uneven work, then, more fascinating in its first, fictionalized half than in the rigorous explications of the second, and one that might have worked better presented purely as a novel. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100277-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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