SOURCE: Kerman, Joseph. “The Miracle Worker.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 5 (23 March 2000): 32–35.

In the following review, Kerman compares Gay's Mozart with three other recent biographies of Mozart.

1.

Peter Gay's Penguin Life of Mozart [Mozart,] tells the story with grace and organizes it with dexterity. It is not pitched at a very high level, and the author has not found anything very distinctive to say about his subject. Gay is a distinguished historian of the Enlightenment, but his remarks on social or intellectual forces that might illuminate the life and works of Mozart are familiar and strike no sparks.

Thus Gay calls the third of Mozart's operas with Lorenzo da Ponte, Così fan tutte, “a belated valentine to the Old Regime”; appearing as it did in 1790, only a few months after the storming of the Bastille, “there was still time for audiences to be frivolous, especially when frivolity...