One of the most challenging things about approaching Mozart’s music with any sort of critical eye is the amount of cultural baggage that has accumulated around his life and work. The Mozart ‘brand’ is an amalgam of legend, rumour, myth and imagination in which a few sensational facts about his life and livelihood combine with a purely emotive response to his compositions, creating a filter through which all of his music is perceived. It is such a pervasive filter that even the Historically Informed Performance movement has merely challenged some layers of perception, yet failed to make a profound mark on the idealization of a reputedly unique genius who is thought to have operated on a different worldly plane from his contemporaries.

The contextualization of Mozart is one of the most important aspects of a study of man and music. An analysis of contemporary composers’ social interactions, even political machinations, reveals telling influences on Mozart’s musical life: on his compositions and in his performance career. In Dorian Bandy’s important study, the author examines the performance aspect of Mozart’s life and demonstrates in an illuminating way the effect this had on his compositional style. It also demonstrates Mozart’s position in comparison to his contemporaries and looks at features of a musical and structural language that was commonplace at the time. This is surely one of the most important elements in the evaluation of the composer: it is hard to be objective about his skills without an understanding of the similarities and differences between him and J. C. Bach, Antonio Salieri, Baldassarre Galuppi and Leopold Koželuch, to name but a few.

This book looks at elements of Mozart’s performance life; the chapters, entitled ‘Variations’ on the opening argument (the ‘Theme’), examine Mozart the performer, pianist, improviser, embellisher and dramatist. Despite this slightly forced structural conceit, the book is written in a clear, approachable style, and one that does not avoid complex discussions, but presents them in an understandable and concise way which is enjoyable to read as a narrative alongside the important arguments it advances.

The ‘Theme’ and first two ‘Variations’ describe the way many, if not most, classical compositions are assembled and how they would have been perceived by a contemporary eighteenth-century listener. The latter is not obvious, and the discussions are illuminating: compositional processes are geared around modular elements which audiences would have recognized – even if subconsciously. In fact, the listener is never far from the subject of this book: the effect of Mozart’s manipulation of expectations, his emotional use of structure and harmony, and even Mozart’s improvisational aims are crucial to the core of Bandy’s analysis.

With regard to the modular elements, Variation 1, ‘Mozart the Performer’, sets out the various types of schemata with clarity and offers many examples of their use. To take one element at random, the Fonte, Bandy explains the harmonic basis of the device, shows the ways that the device can be used and then provides many examples of how it was used by Mozart. Even at this early stage in the book, the author gives examples of how Mozart develops and modifies this basic trope and the effect it has on the listener. This holds true for many other modular elements.

Bringing these ideas together, the author writes, for example, of the second movement of the Piano Concerto in D major k451:

This in turn gives rise to the listener perception:

The modular approach to music forms the backbone to all of the themes in the book, and it is summarized at the end of Variation 5 – the final chapter discussing ‘Mozart the Dramatist’:

Variations 3 to 5 are more focused on this interpretative stance. Mozart’s dramatic motivation has been much discussed by many commentators and theorists over the years, but very rarely has such a clear explanation been given for audience perception based on expectation, which in turn is based on the build-up of modular elements. Music examples are very helpful and revealing, and I suspect this is the first time annotations such as ‘Losing control’, ‘Splat!!’ and ‘Failure to recover’ have been featured in such a learned discourse on Mozart (see, for example, pages 184–185).

On the subject of musical examples, all of the illustrations are clear and relevant, and aid comprehension of the text. There are some instances where, possibly owing to space constraints, a list of examples is given in the text but not illustrated and the choice of what was and was not illustrated in the book feels somewhat arbitrary. Considering that many have access to freely available digital resources online, the quoted examples are at least fairly easy to look up, even though that slightly distracts the reader.

Dorian Bandy draws on many elements to illustrate the possible aims of Mozart’s compositional practice. Extracts from letters are used to show both expected listener responses and performance-practice issues and how they may affect audience perception of the composer-performer’s intentions. All of the chosen quotations are helpful in demonstrating this, with the following excerpt from a letter from Mozart to his father serving to illustrate the very essence of the author’s entire thesis:

This detail goes to the heart of Bandy’s overview of the showman aspect of Mozart’s performances.

The general emphasis is naturally on keyboard improvisation, performance and compositional techniques, as it is in this aspect Mozart was primarily known and revered. However, other genres are brought into the discussion eventually and given attention on this basis. Happily, the author mentions the instruments available to Mozart. Rather than the generic ‘piano’, mention is made of the fact that the finite compass of contemporary instruments enhanced, rather than restricted the creative process: ‘If the piano did not limit Mozart’s creative problem-solving, however, it certainly provided a vehicle for the broadening of his expressive palette’ (55). This leads to a discussion of the actual instruments Mozart used and preferred – a welcome element. In the final chapter, ‘Coda’, which discusses the art of performing Mozart, Bandy outlines his feelings about the aesthetics of performance, and naturally this involves a discussion of historically informed performance practice. However, although the author clearly understands and is sympathetic to the movement, he is by no means exclusively aiming his conclusions at period-instrument performers.

One of the ironies of such a detailed study as Mozart the Performer is that far from making Mozart’s music less extraordinary by analysing the complex processes in terms of his pianistic facility, humanizing these procedures actually has the opposite effect: the results that Mozart achieves, which come from identifiable sources (whether stock pianistic gestures or modular units), are remarkable in their emotional content and development. The overriding impression left by such an excellent, interesting and well-written book as this is that Mozart’s achievement appears all the greater when we see that he was using creative processes that were available to and used by most, if not all, of his colleagues at the time.

The author clearly loves the material he is describing, but is not overawed by it. He understands the functions of the compositional process and takes delight in them without diminishing any of the achievements of Mozart, or indeed any of his contemporaries. This book represents an ideal synthesis of outstanding musicological practice with practical pedagogical information; in addition to an important angle of study on a well-documented composer, it also represents a high point in historical-performance research.