My Book Report

If insects can die of sadness, I bet this one did after he found out that Mozart was dead too.

Even though he's been dead a long, long time and his music is pretty old-fashioned, I bet everyone probably knows the name Mozart. But what do we really know about him? Not very much I bet since he lived before TV.

Well, I decided to learn a little bit more about him. This week I began reading the autobiography of Mozart, titled Mozart: A Cultural Biography, by Robert W. Gutman. It is very interesting. For one thing, did you know that Mozart was his last name? His first name was actually Wolf Gang! That's a pretty tough sounding name for someone who liked violins so much, (but maybe that's how he could get away with it, kind of like the boy named Sue only the opposite). Plus, he's from Austria, so I think it's weird that his name is in English.

Anyway, Mozart was born in the 1700's, and began composing operas and orchestra music when he was only 6! On the one hand, that is very impressive. But on the other hand, it seems kind of lame that he never tried anything else since he was so good at music right away. I mean, once you've written a few operas and you're only 10, maybe now you could try to be an inventor or something?

That is partly why I was so happy to see that he had written a book, even though it is all about him, but I think he was alive before they had mysteries. But again, maybe that's what he could have invented if he hadn't been so obsessed with music!?

Anyway, the biggest problem so far that I am having is that books don't have audio, so I have to pretend to know what he's talking about when he describes the music. I mean, I know some of his music, but it would help if he had notated the music in some way that I could follow along like so--BAH. Bum-BAH. Bum-bah-bum-bah-bum-BAH! Or if they had had books on tape back then they could have just had him read while we heard his music except I don't think he spoke English. But he didn't speak Italian either and he still wrote Don Giovanni so it seems like it would have been possible, given his greatness.

Anyway, so far I am only on page 8, so there's probably a lot more to know about the mini-maestro, but to find that out I guess you'll have to read it yourself...