Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces

In exhilarating, transformative prose, the poet Patrick Mackie reveals a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive.

Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand about his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer?

Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship.

In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being.

Patrick Mackie is a poet whose work has appeared in PN Review, The Poetry Review, The Paris Review and New Statesman. A former visiting fellow at Harvard, he is the author of The Further Adventures of the Lives of the Saints and Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool