Author Jane Glover is a conductor who specializes in Mozart, performing his works all over the globe. With her practical and complex grasp of his musical style, she has both the skill and the grace to extend her treatment of Mozart’s Women: The Man, The Music, and The Loves in His Life beyond the strict bounds of biography into the realm of Mozart’s musical imagination. Glover begins her book with a lively account of Mozart’s two families (his own and his wife’s), paying particular attention to the composer’s dependence on and high regard for the women in his life. These real-life sections set the stage for the final act of her book, where Glover, with insinuating (i.e., Mozartian!) high spirits, reveals just how thoroughly Mozart lived with the female characters he created for the operatic stage. An outstanding example is Glover’s extended treatment of Susanna, the heroine of The Marriage of Figaro: these pages of the book flow like an aria in prose, a song of praise to Mozart’s finest dramatic creation, a woman whose wit and joie de vivre present the clearest possible reflection of the composer’s own humaneness.
Michael Alec Rose is a composer and professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches a course on Mozart.
