This biography might almost have been subtitled Father and Son, so heavily does it lean on Mozart's relationship with his cranky, possessive, endlessly guiding and hectoring parent. Leopold Mozart, as is generally admitted, was not an admirable or sympathetic character,, and after marketing his son as. a child prodigy he seems to have taken it for granted that Wolfgang could not from then on manage his life or affairs" without him at his elbow. The climax came with Mozart's violent break with the Archbishop of Salzburg, of which, his feudal-minded father, totally disapproved while the son angrily insisted on his own independence and "honour". Plainly, Mozart was far from being the conventional 18th-century musician into which some recent biographers, reacting against the romantic hagiography of 19th-century writers such as Otto Jahn, had reduced him. He was out a spoken, passionate, mercurial, touchy, often as savage as Swift in his denunciation of the ills of society and the arrogance of the nobility, a man who had to come to terms with royal and imperial courts, but still disliked most of the people who inhabited them. In his way, Mozart fought for the social standing and independence of the musician just as Liszt and others did a generation later, though he died too soon to profit from the ultimate victory of this cause. His marriage to Constanze Weber was a good though not an ideal one, and he had a feckless, bohemian streak which did not interfere with his capacity for sustained, intensive work; but he died at a crisis time or moment of transition in his career, in debt and with his private life in disorder. As is well known by now, Mozart's death came just too soon for him to reap the success of The Magic Flute, but within a few years his music had achieved European fame and his widow amassed a small fortune and married again, to a diplomat, dying in 1846. This book does, seem slightly tendentious and over-knowing in stretches, and it is also rather overlong as a whole, but it is still recommended reading for anyone at all interested in Mozart.