Night Music

Rating:
Summary: Not a note of joy in the book
Review: Plodding, bitter prose that suggests the author's contempt for everyone but himself. Even Mozart plays second fiddle to the author's angst.

Rating:
Summary: Amateurish
Review: Publishers must be scraping barrels for works like this to get into print. I fail to see how anyone could identify with the main character, and therefore care what happens to him. People don't talk like that, people don't act like that (or if they do, I don't want to meet them). Contrived, unbelievable plot, and cardboard caricature characters. Associating Mozart with this book is sacrilege.

Rating:
Summary: music,mistery,Mozart.
Review: reading this book,one is taken immediately into a world of intrigue! the author lets you off into a musical jurney that lets your spirit soar,savoring the divine melodies of Mozart.Suddenly you are jolted back to a world filled with scheeming,greedy and spoiled individuals.The mystery that envelopes you,the music that elevates you intermingled so beautifully.The narrative is fluid,it transports you to magical,musical places and then again it jolts you back to a mesmerizing and some times gruesome reality! As you read,you want to take time to savor the lavish settings the author so masterfully paints for you,but you have to go on;follow that plot,pushed on by suspense! how would it all turn out? I love Mozart's music,and I love this book!It's an intricate jurney that parallels the master's music;glorious,pensive and like Don Giovanni,disturbing!

Rating:
Summary: less is more
Review: The idea is intriguing (a discovery of 14-year-old Mozart's diary), and the combination of art and mystery adds to the enjoyment. But - as Mozart knew better than any other - less REALLY is more. The cast of characters rivals those in "War and Peace" (without the memorability factor). The thumbnail characterizations are formulaic to an annoying degree. The laundry list of furnishings, napery, crystal, silver, food, drink, locations, directions, cars and other modes of transportation, et cetera is staggering. Somewhere in all this verbiage lurks a tiny plot. Dr. Slater does a VERY good job at debunking Peter Shaffer and all that Salieri nonsense, and his writing about the composing of the Requiem is spot on. But the over-flowered prose (Dr. Slater ought to look up "whence": it means "from where", so "from whence" is tautological), the endless adjectives, phrases, modifiers, the information-I-never-needed-to-have - all that is stuffing that is stultifying. I found myself counting off percentages of pages (10%=56 pages) as I read, and used the book as a nighttime soporific. My advice: skip the book and listen to any of the 626 koechel-listed works of Mozart. Any one of these "less" is definitely: MORE.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The premise of the book was intriguing. But the writing is so poor and the plotting so sloppy that I was sorely disappointed. Too bad the novel was not rewritten by Dan Brown before publication; read one of his instead and skip this.