Mozart a cultural biography

I've rarely had such sharply ambivalent reactions to a biography as I did to this one. Let me try to explain what I mean, and I'll start with the downside.

First of all, long stretches of the book are close to being unreadable if you lack familiarity with 18th century central European history and geography, and don't stand already on intimate terms with the corpus of Mozart's work.

The difficulty is compounded by Mr. Gutman's writing style, which is given to serial convolutions. Any one of his long sentences can contain as many as five references to people, places, historical events and musical works that will be utterly obscure to people, like many of us, who lack a scholar's grounding.

The complexity problem is further aggravated by Gutman's proclivity for covering EVERYTHING in Mozart's short life. Mozart himself, as well as his father Leopold and his sister Nannerl (a nick-name), were compulsive letter-writers and diarists, and for par