“Mozart the Performer offers a genuinely new way to process Mozart’s music, one that answers to a widely varied range of evidence at once musical, historical, and biographical. It constitutes a bold attempt to reimagine Mozart’s creative process—particularly as that of a self-conscious performer, an ‘inveterate showman’ playing to an audience—and to draw extensive interpretive conclusions from that reimagining.”

Scott Burnham, the Graduate Center, City University of New York

“Mozart the Performer is a fresh attempt to demythologize Mozart, to ground his creativity in real-world experiences and concerns, as opposed to the image of a ‘divine’ composer, the beauty of whose music somehow floats above mundane explication. Mozart the Performer is a striking expansion of scholarly horizons.”

W. Dean Sutcliffe, University of Auckland

“The joie de vivre of Mozart’s performerly approach to composition is echoed in Bandy’s own inviting prose. Structuring the book as a theme and variations, he welcomes the reader into that growing ensemble celebrating the tactile, the playful, the parodic, and above all, the humane in Mozart.”

Adeline Mueller, Mount Holyoke College

"Finding something new to say about Mozart is no easy feat. In Mozart the Performer, Dorian Bandy tackles this challenge by focusing on a crucial component of Mozart’s musical life—performance—and using insights gleaned from it to illuminate previously unconsidered aspects of Mozart’s compositions. . . . Bandy skillfully crafts an original, insightful thesis, offering an impressive model for scholars to emulate. . . . In doing so, Bandy is advancing musicological efforts to humanize composers like Mozart who have accumulated centuries of mythological baggage."

Journal of the American Musicological Society

"Ambitious and finely wrought. . . . The most valuable contribution this important and engaging book makes is its invitation to imagine the performative, theatrical Mozart’s compositional process, and to interpret, play, and listen to his music differently as a result. . . . An original and compelling portrait of Mozart the performer."
 

Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America