Mozart

Eva Gesine Baur tells Mozart's dissonant life without glossing over the fact that the creator of incredible music also had a black side: conscious of his divine talent, he lied, tricked and intrigued. He gave away bliss and distributed evil. The biography explores this abyss.

Mozart himself has put the problem into the world that his admirers and biographers struggle with: he wrote letters that expose his human weaknesses. Other contemporary testimonies also show a Mozart who was anything but divine. The facts forbid to blame his father, Salieri or his wife Constanze. The philosopher Norbert Elias declared the separation of the work and the man Mozart as "artificial, misleading and unnecessary".

His suffering from his outer ugliness helps to understand his desire for beauty. A remark by the great Mozart conductor Richard Strauss led the author to compare Mozart with the god Eros, as he is described in Plato's "Symposion". Eros is not the beloved of all, but the great lover. Not beautiful himself, he looks for beauty. A sorcerer, but also a great intriguer. A demon, driven by an insatiable longing. Neither God nor man. Rather a messenger between the divine and the all-too-human. Mozart and Eros: the great contradiction. Both earthly and celestial.