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Mozart by paul johnson6/29/2023 “He enjoyed existence and wanted everyone to be as happy as he.” Deeply religious, Mozart could be exceedingly charming, while also displaying a crass sense of humor. Was Mozart’s life fundamentally tragic? Not if you consider that he was an “easygoing person, whose brief spasms of hot temper and outbursts of grievances were mere cloudlets racing across a sunny view of life,” Johnson writes. But as the historian Paul Johnson writes, that portrayal is very much a fiction, and in his slim new biography, Johnson seeks to counter the most egregious misconceptions. If we tend to envision the short life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as primarily unhappy - ever at odds with his wife, impoverished and in debt, driven to an early grave by his rival Antonio Salieri - it is largely because of Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus” and Milos Forman’s film adaptation of the same name.
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