SOURCE: Winder, Robert. “A Perfect Music.” New Statesman 128, no. 4458 (18 October 1999): 53–54.

In the following review, Winder offers a positive assessment of Mozart, praising its brevity and clarity.

In recent years our biography machine has been calibrated to extra large, turning out fat works which sought to suggest, through sheer weight of words, both the magisterial stature of the subject and the insatiable curiosity of the author. Dickens, Tolstoy, Woolf, Lawson, Jenkins, Shaw, Botham—if they couldn't run to 600 pages, they weren't cutting the mustard. They seemed almost modelled on those roomy 19th-century novels that no one wrote any more—compendious family sagas taking us from the cradle to the grave—and they swaggered in the bookshops. But fashions change. Someone has twiddled a knob on the machine, and the brief life can once more be glimpsed on the production line. It would no doubt be too much to attribute...