Classical Music: In The Clothes They Stood Up In, Alan Bennett presents us with that disparaged contemporary "everyman": the middle-aged, middle-class professional.
Each night after supper Mr Ransome "wallowed in Mozart; he luxuriated in him; he let the little Viennese soak away all the dirt and disgustedness he had had to sit through in his office all day". Doubtless poor Mr Ransome would have been shocked to learn that Fr Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, had spent much of his own life whoring, gaming, scheming and drinking (often in the company of his friend Casanova). But for five of his 90 years Da Ponte inspired this most celebrated composer to the pinnacle of musical achievement.
It would be hard not to notice that this year marks the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Every major city is marking the event. The burghers of Vienna and Salzburg are preening and puffing themselves. The recording and publishing industries have gone into overdrive. Of all the books published for the Mozart anniversary, I doubt any will be more witty and enjoyable than Anthony Holden's.
The Man Who Wrote Mozart is a genuine pleasure. At turns amusing, poignant and instructive, it engagingly captures the chemistry between librettist and composer that produced those masterpieces of the operatic repertoire: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte.
Part of Holden's skill comes in his streamlined approach. Rather than subject Da Ponte to a "laundry list" biography, he concentrates on the important themes and events of the poet's life. The 85 years not spent with Mozart are quickly and colourfully told: the disreputable life in Italy beforehand; afterwards, marriage and bankruptcy in London, flight to America and eventual recognition for his work with Mozart. Da Ponte became the first professor of Italian at Columbia University and oversaw the building of America's first opera house in New York, before dying in 1838.
The heart of the book, however, is three central chapters on the period 1785-90 when Da Ponte worked with Mozart. "He had been prevented by the plots of his enemies from exercising his divine genius in Vienna," recalled the poet in old age. "I can never remember without satisfaction and joy that Europe and the whole world own the exquisite vocal music of this remarkable genius largely thanks to my own perseverance and determination."
It was an exaggerated claim, but not without some truth. When, for example, those adversaries at court tried to block the staging of Figaro (it was based on a banned play), Da Ponte worked his savvy charm on Joseph II.
"Very well," the Emperor replied after hearing him out. "If that is so, I'll trust your taste as to the music, and your discretion as to the morals. Have the score sent to the copyist." It was a trick the politically naive Mozart would have found impossible to pull off.
While Da Ponte's sway at court provided reassurance, his words inspired Mozart to his finest operatic expression. "The superiority of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas to any other works by either man suggests a perfect synergy," writes Holden, "that the librettist brought to these works the theatrical and poetic qualities the composer could not find elsewhere."
Holden's book finds its perfect complement in David Cairns's elegant study. Mozart and His Operas is a love letter to Mozart. There is a gentlemanly quality to his prose style, but that does not hide the blazing intensity of his zeal. He demolishes the view, encapsulated by the 19th-century pianist Anton Rubenstein, that Mozart was "eternal sunshine in music". Instead he demands that we "see beneath the beautiful patterns, to realize all that the music's impeccable control concealed - the intensities, the layers of irony, the longing, the undercurrents of sadness, the coexistence of the celestial and the earthly, the sheer intelligence . . .". Mozart's enduring appeal, he argues, lies "in his music's embodying at one and the same time the perfection our souls long for and the sensation of our longing".
The success of Cairns's acclaimed two-volume biography of Berlioz came in how it stripped away (in more than 1,500 pages) the layers of myth surrounding the composer and revealed him anew. He does not attempt the same mighty feat with Mozart, but rather shines shafts of light onto each of the main operas. He is best of all on the Magic Flute - the first Mozart opera he came to love and the one he feels particularly moved to defend from musical snobs who dismiss it as mere pantomime. Patiently he walks us through the apparent plot inconsistencies, Masonic conspiracy theories and perplexingly spare neo-classical scoring to reveal the opera as "Mozart's supreme achievement as a music-dramatist". Beethoven, as it happens, thought so too, putting Cairns in elevated company - although Holden naturally would disagree.
Both of these satisfying books help us understand why Mozart's operas continue to resonate more than 200 years later, not just in the world's leading opera houses, but also in popular culture.
The highpoint, after all, of The Shawshank Redemption - consistently voted among the most popular films of all time - comes when the central character plays a recording of the duet Che soave zeffiretto from Figaro through the public address system. "I tell you, those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream," says one prisoner, "and for the briefest of moments every last man at Shawshank felt free." Mr Ransome had it right after all.
Richard Aldous teaches at UCD. His biography of Malcolm Sargent is available in Pimlico paperback
The Man Who Wrote Mozart: The Extraordinary Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte By Anthony Holden. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 238pp. £18.99
Mozart and His Operas By David Cairns. Penguin Allen Lane, 290pp. £22