Mozart Letters

Last autumn English Critic W. J. Turner published a biography* of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (TIME, Sept. 6). To make his portrait of 18th-Century Composer Mozart accurate, Critic Turner pondered anew the numerous letters of the Mozart family. When the portrait was finished, it showed Mozart, not as a super-fastidious, classically-restrained courtier, but as a hearty, bluff personality.

Last week the taste of Mozart's letters offered by Critic Turner was extended into a whole banquet by the publication for the first time in English of the complete Mozart family correspondence.** Gathering, editing and translating the 600-odd letters of the collection had cost Emily Anderson, a publicity-shy British music-lover and scholar, ten years of scholarly effort. Readers of the newly-published letters found Critic Turner's impressions confirmed, found further that Composer Wolfgang Amadeus and his shrewd, harried Father Leopold Mozart were penetrating and sometimes irreverent observers of the manners of their time, gusty reporters with great fondness for the seven-and-eight-letter German equivalents of four-letter English words.

* MOZART, THE MAN AND HIS WORKS -- Knopf ($4).

**-- LETTERS OF MOZART AND HIS FAMILY, By Emily Anderson, 3 volumes, Macmillan ($18).

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