Realistic, moving, engrossing and positively brilliant, this first American biography of the 18th-century composer re-creates Mozart - the man and his music - against the background of the world he lived in. For Marcia Davenport, the research and writing of Mozart was truly a labor of love, during which she retraced every journey he made, saw every dwelling (then extant) in which he had ever lived, every theatre where his works were first performed, and every library and museum where his manuscripts were then to be seen. Of this monumental task she wrote: "I think I know what he looked like, how he spoke, what he did day by day. I have combined this knowledge of him with conscientious study of his known life, and have set down in a continuous record what I believe to have happened." In this eloquent work of historical reconstruction Davenport lets her characters tell their own stories, and accompanies her narrative with letters and other original documents. She builds from Mozart's infancy toward the climactic meeting in 1787 of Mozart, Lorenzo Da Ponte and Casanova in Prague, when Don Giovanni was being written, to Mozart's tragically early death. The result is a biography of such commanding stature that it has remained unassailable since its publication in 1932.