In his letters home, Leopold alternated tales of excitement and luxury with feeble attempts to portray the country as dangerous and the journey as uncomfortable and hazardous. Melograni's description of Mozart's adolescence vividly brings out the envy that his sister and mother must have felt as he travelled through Italy with his father. This inappropriate behaviour further marked out the family as troublesome, may have led to his snubbing by the royal family in Naples, and resulted in the empress Maria Teresa's famous letter to her son, Archduke Ferdinand, warning him not to take Mozart into his service. Leopold Mozart's response to the hostility of the Viennese musical establishment to this operatic effort by his 12-year-old son was to write a petition to the emperor Joseph II. Mozart's reputation was not helped by the fiasco surrounding La finta semplice in Vienna three years later. The nobility would have been outraged by this presumptuous behaviour, and indignant that the family did not know their place, eschewing patronage in favour of direct commercialism. Melograni argues that this was not only a sign of the new entrepreneurial world that was to dominate Mozart's later career, but also that it marked the start of the decline in the esteem in which the family was held by aristocracy and royalty. Here, anyone with the money could come between noon and three in the afternoon and hear the feats that had dazzled the courts of Europe. He begins with the Mozart children's first public concerts in London, when the two young prodigies were paraded at an inn near St Paul's Cathedral. Nevertheless, Melograni does present an interesting perspective on some aspects of Mozart's life, notably his early career. There is no new material, and the book is not really informed by recent Mozart scholarship. The narrative is based on a careful reading of the family letters and previous biographers of the late twentieth century, particularly Hildesheimer and Solomon. The composer's life is presented chronologically, and his music is not discussed in any detail. Melograni has written a straightforward, rather traditional biography of Mozart. It has now been elegantly translated into English by Lydia Cochrane. This book was published in Italian as WAM: La vita e il tempo di Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 2003, with a second edition in 2006.

Piero Melograni, now in his late seventies, was a professor of political science at the University of Perugia for much of his career.

Mozart early life