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1791: Mozart's Last Year

H.C. Robbins Landon has become one of our most prolific writers on Mozart. Fortunately, he is as careful as he is productive. Each of his books is meticulously researched and thoroughly documented.

Though Landon discovered Mozart early -- at the age of 13 -- most of his academic life has been spent documenting the life and music of Joseph Haydn. He had no intention of writing a book about Mozart until he was inspired by an external event: Peter Shaffer's play and film Amadeus. "As a film it was superb entertainment, but of course it had little enough to do with Mozart's actual life," Landon writes in the preface to 1791, his response to Amadeus and his effort to set straight the record of Mozart's last year.

As is the case with most of Landon's Mozart books, 1791 is a quick read (240 pages). But it is packed with information, much of it new to the general reader. Basing his account on authentic documents ("There are many more of these than one might dare to expect"), Landon effectivly sums up Mozart's activities during the final few months of his short life: the Frankfurt coronation, his duties as imperial chamber composer, his application to the Vienna city council for the job of Kapellmeister of St. Stephen's Cathedral, the coronation in Prague. Some parts contain no surprises: Many readers will find little that is new in Landon's Masonic explanation of Die Zauberflöte (K. 620). But this is the exception, because much of 1791 contains information that has recently come to light; in regards to Mozart, Landon is probably our greatest detective.

His account of how the Requiem (K. 626) came to be composed reads like a well-crafted mystery. (Surprisingly, he gives almost complete credence to early accounts, by Niemetschek and Nissen, that have been disparaged by other biographers.) And Landon's treatment of the composer's final illness is just as compelling.

Concerning Mozart's death, Landon notes: "The truth is often more gripping than even the most carefully conceived and delicately executed fantasy." As he has so convincingly shown, the same could be said of Mozart's life.