The Life of Mozart — The Folio Society | Edward Holmes | 1991 | First Edition | Fine

Edward Holmes knew people who had known Mozart. That is the whole of why this book still matters.

Holmes was a working music critic in the 1840s, a friend of Vincent Novello, and he wrote this life in 1845 while the memory of Mozart was still held in living hands rather than archives. He had travelled the same roads, spoken to those who had heard the man play, and worked from the correspondence when the letters were fresh evidence rather than scholarly furniture. It was the first substantial English life of Mozart, and it reads like a book written by someone in pursuit of a subject rather than someone assembling a monument.

What lifts this edition above a reprint of a Victorian curiosity is the editor. Christopher Hogwood — founder of the Academy of Ancient Music, and as fluent in the primary sources as any musicologist of his generation — edited the text, wrote the introduction and supplied additional notes. He corrects Holmes where the nineteenth century got it wrong and lets him run where he got it right. The result is a book you can trust and still enjoy, which is a rarer combination in music biography than it ought to be.

Blue cloth boards with the Mozart silhouette debossed in crimson within a gilt cartouche to the front, red cloth spine with gilt lettering, pictorial musical-score endpapers and a red top stain to the text block. In the original red slipcase with gilt lettering and fleur-de-lis ornaments. Illustrated throughout with portraits, a map and music examples, with 23 plates. xxxi and 318 pages, with index. First Folio Society edition, 1991.

Condition is Fine. The red spine has no fading or dulling whatsoever, which is worth stating plainly: fading to the spine is the fault this title almost always carries, and copies described as near fine routinely have it. The blue cloth of the boards is clean and unspotted — the other common complaint, since blue cloth marks readily. The bottom page edges are clean and unstained, the text block is bright, the binding tight and square, and the gilt is unrubbed. No inscriptions, names or bookplates. The slipcase is bright and sound, without wrinkling to the panels.

Folio's early nineties production was excellent and this is a good example of it — proper cloth, a debossed and gilded front board rather than a printed one, and endpapers set with music. Combine that with a first printing and a copy that has escaped the usual spine fading, and you have a considerably better than average survival of a book that most collectors of Mozart end up wanting on the shelf sooner or later.

Extra photographs available on request. Just get in touch and we will be happy to help.

Wrapped in good heavy paper — we don't skimp on that — and packed into a sturdy box so nothing shifts on the way to you, wherever in the world that happens to be. Kat packs and checks every parcel herself, and she is not easily pleased. The unwrapping ought to be half the pleasure.