Mozart and the Wolf Gang: By Anthony Burgess

Mozart and the Wolf Gang is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds of Anthony Burgess's fictions.. With its sizzying swirl of formal and thematic invention, this slim book may strike one as something even more impossible that any of Burgess' earlier tours de force. Mozart was the supreme musical genius whose work may be analysed by the expert without elucidating its true nature, and whose life has been presented so often, in book and in film, that it would be foolish to retell the story yet again.Anthony Burgess’s tribute has an ironic component. He sets his scene mostly in heaven, from which Saddam Hussein’s guns can be faintly heard. He splits himself up into several warring personages, initiates discussions which get nowhere except a region where understanding of the nature of music (not just Mozart’s) may conceivably begin to dawn. Mozart brings solace to our tattered lives but he also brings bewilderment.This is, in fact, a kaleidoscope of a book, which goes beyond the bounds of even Anthony Burgess’s fiction: in which an attempt to understand Mozart is made through celestial dialogue, a Stendhalian effort at turning Symphony No. 40 into fiction, an opera libretto, and fragments of a film script join with the author’s own internal colloquies to answer the unanswerable. In effect, a gang of wolves is on the scent of the meaning of music. Written in 1991 to commemorate the bicentennial of Mozart’s death, Burgess’s novella-length piece is a compendium of themes, genres and even art-forms revolving around the one central preoccupation of the entire Burgess oeuvre: the reconcilability of life and art. This is a kaleidoscope of a book, which stretches even the bounds of even Anthony Burgess’s fiction in an attempt to understand Mozart through celestial dialogue, an opera libretto, and fragments of a film script.As gracefully witty as it is daringly experimental, Mozart and the Wolf Gang is one of Burgess’s late, great works, often overlooked due to its experimental form, which nevertheless remains accessible, entertaining and yet refreshingly original to this day.This new critical edition with analysis from noted musicologist and a first-class literary critic Alan Shockley enables this work’s significance to be assessed by a new generation of readers and scholars.