Loving Mozart: A Past Life Memory of the Composer's Final Years

Rating:
Summary: A "must read"
Review: for anyone who has ever stopped to wonder WHY one has these memories that just do not fit in one's current life. Also, this book gives some insight into Mozart as a person with talent, not the "man touched by God" as a recent A&E commentator claimed.

Rating:
Summary: We hear only from the most courageous
Review: There are two kinds of people who claim famous past lives: total phonies, who are simply out to make themselves seem more important, and the rare genuine articles, who really do have some connection, direct or archetypical, with a historical figure.

How to tell which is which? Just ask the person this: "When you found out you were or knew so-and-so... how did you deal with the shock and the fear?" If they don't know what you're talking about, you have a genuine, garden-variety phony.

Real ones do what most of us would do in their situation: look in the mirror, think 'how could I have been THAT?', feel surreal and worry that maybe they are just crazy. When considering telling anyone, they worry about their reputations, their jobs, their relationships. They know about the phonies, the weekend Cleopatras, and they know what they will be called. They sometimes wish their memories would just go away.

We hear only from the most courageous of them.

_Loving Mozart_ was ten years in the making; ten years for the author to gather the information and the courage to publish. Wishful thinking simply doesn't take that long, and lusts after perfect experiences, not the painful, ambiguous, messy ones portrayed. Besides, if the author had the total freedom of fantasy, why not go the whole hog and claim to have been Mozart himself?

This book isn't about fame and glory anyway; it is about music, and about love. It is about loyalty, joy and a passion for creating beauty that transcend poverty, rejection and death. It is about the nature of souls and their multi-life connections and missions, and about how inspiration is drawn from the Divine.

If you firmly disbelieve in reincarnation you don't want to read it; it will just seem like airy-fairy nonsense, and the details that differ from history (as is inevitable, since people often remember the same events differently) will peck at you. If you can accept reincarnation as fantasy, you will be both moved and uplifted. If you accept reincarnation as reality, you will find much that is confirmatory -- and still be moved and uplifted. If you are undecided but open-minded, there is a lot to learn, and this deeply beautiful book will stay in your mind and heart for a long time after reading.

Rating:
Summary: A Book of Haunting Beauty
Review: When I read this book four years ago it haunted me for a long time. The beauty of its prose and the lucidity of the author's memories lingered in the back of mind and in the recesses of my heart, adding a dimension to the character of a young man few people can say they understand. There are no portraits of Franz Süssmayr, no eye-witness accounts of what kind of person he was, or what his relationship with Mozart was really like. This book fills in those spaces to reveal a gifted, generous, tender-hearted man, who was a loyal friend to the end-and beyond.

Books that claim to have their basis in past-life recall are always met with ridicule because people who don't believe in reincarnation are not educated in the field and thus cannot comprehend all the profound implications of it, or the myriad beautiful possibilities that go along with it. Immature souls see life as black and white. Mature souls see life as an ocean of limitless color, light and shadow, tone and texture. This book is a creation of all these qualities.

I recently re-read Loving Mozart and I received more from it than I did after my first reading. Only when something contains the truth can it affect us this way-it touches our hearts again and again, regardless of how many times we pick it up, dust it off and allow it to take us into its private world. When truth is that palpable, we know it deep in our subconscious whether we recognize it or not, and assumed historical details lose their grasp. Ask any police detective if any ten people will remember an event the same way and the answer will be no. Mozart knew a great many people, some of whom were never allowed into his private life. Many of those people went on to write about him, and even they do not always agree on just what happened at the end of Mozart's life. We remember events from our own experience and inner reality, and history is written by the winners anyway. Franz Süssmayr was not one of the winners. The winners went on to create a Mozart that would appeal to charitable organizations and individuals-an eternal manchild, a composer who never struggled over a piece of music, but composed as easily as writing out a grocery list, an apollonian god.

Some critics of this book don't recognize that Loving Mozart is not a book about Mozart, but a book about the spiritual path of someone who simply loved, and acted out that love in a beautiful, selfless way. If that's not Truth I don't know what is.