This etext was produced by John Mamoun (mamounjo@umdnj.edu), Charles
Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
The following is the text of "Mozart: The Man and the Artist, asRevealed in his own Words," compiled and annotated by FriedrichKerst and translated into english, and edited, with newintroduction and additional notes, by Henry Edward Krehbiel.Each page was cut out of the original book with an X-actoknife and fed into an Automatic Document Feeder Scanner tomake this e-text, so the original book was disbinded in orderto save it.
Some adaptations from the original text were made whileformatting it for an e-text. Italics in the original book wereignored in making this e-text, unless they referred to propernouns, in which case they are put in quotes in the e-text.Italics are problematic because they are not easily rendered inASCII text.
This electronic text was prepared by John Mamoun with help fromnumerous other proofreaders, including those associated withCharles Franks' Distributed Proofreaders website. Thanks to C.Franks, S. Harris, A. Montague, S. Morrison, J. Roberts, R. Rowe,R. Tremblay, R. Zimmerman and several others for proof-reading.
Corrections for version 11 of this text made by Andrew Sly.
The German composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was notonly a musical genius, but was also one of the pre-eminentgeniuses of the Western world. He defined in his music a systemof musical thought and an entire state of mind that were unlikeany previously experienced. A true child prodigy, he begancomposing at age 5 and rapidly developed his unmistakable style;by 18 he was composing works capable of altering the mind-statesof entire civilizations. Indeed, he and his predecessor Bachaccomplished the Olympian feat of adding to the human concepts ofcivility and civilization. So these two were not just musicalgeniuses, but geniuses of the humanities.
Mozart's music IS civilization. It encompasses all that is humaneabout an idealized civilization. And it probably was Mozart'smain purpose to create and propagate a concept of a greatcivilization through his music. He wanted to show his fellowEuropeans, with their garbage-polluted citystreets, their violentmono-maniacal leaders and their stifling, non-humane bureaucracies,new ideas on how to run their civilizations properly. He wantedthem to hear and feel a sense of civilized movement, of themusical expressions of man moving as he would if upholding thehighest values of idealized societies. One need