Mozart's father wasn't a tyrant but a devoted man who sacrificed his own career for his son. Salzburg wasn't a backwater, he says, but enjoyed a strong music community. Johnson does offer his own corrections to standard Mozart history. Johnson is a capable and confident scholar who writes with lively prose. This book isn't a substitute for longer, critical works about Mozart, like those by Robert Gutman (1999) and Maynard Solomon (1995), but rather is a survey for a general audience. He estimates about 2,000 books and upwards of 8,000 "Mozartian monographs" (pp. As with these other figures, there are thousands of works about Mozart. This book is similar to a half-dozen other short (200 pages or less) biographies that Johnson has written about Darwin, Socrates, Napoleon, Churchill, Jesus, and George Washington. With over forty books and numerous awards to his credit, the British Catholic Paul Johnson is one of today's pre-eminent historians, journalists, and public intellectuals. Paul Johnson, Mozart: A Life (New York: Viking, 2013), 164pp.
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