Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces, Mackie

Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand of his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer? 

Following Mozart from his adolescence in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, and from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of 18th-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship.  

In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the 18th century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today, as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being. 

Author: Patrick Mackie 
Format: Hardcover, 368 pages 
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2023) 
ISBN: 9780374606206