To be sure, there was little else she could do: the essential orientation of her book is, after all, psychoanalytic. Defying this sullen anti-psychoanalytic atmosphere, Brophy has left her first formulations – ‘Freud pointed out. For the book is drenched in psychoanalysis, and since its first appearance analysis has been put even more on the defensive by a mixture of gossip about Freud’s private life and of vehement, and often malicious or uninformed, scepticism about his ideas. Yet, while this reissue comes to us virtually unrevised, it remains as welcome as it was a quarter of a century ago – in some ways even more welcome. It is good news, if hardly astonishing, that Mozart’s stature is in no way diminished by such microscopic examination.īrigid Brophy’s Mozart the Dramatist, originally published in 1964, is no doubt the bravest among this trio, the text most open to wholesale challenge. Together, they give us a sense that we are closing in on the real Mozart, stripping away as they do myth after myth and replacing impressionistic conjectures by precise information. These three books are a case in point: a freewheeling analysis of Mozart the opera composer in the Enlightenment, a thoroughly documented survey of Mozart’s last year, and a technical study of Mozart’s manuscripts. The literature on Mozart is almost as diverse, though surely not quite so glorious, as Mozart’s own output.
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