Description: In Mozart's Ghosts, author Mark Everist investigates how the composer's past status can be understood as part of today's veneration. Examining the developing reputation of Mozart from his death in 1791 to the present, Everist argues that modern reverence for the composer is conditioned by earlier responses to his music, and that such earlier responses are more complex than allowed by a standard "reception studies" model.
Review Quotes: Everist's is precisely the sort of account that can allow us to make sense of new moments in Mozart reception such as this...That we now, in the twenty-first century, consider this music to be expressive of the beautiful has to do not only with the way it sounds but also with the history of its use in aesthetic objects, and Everist's book is a useful elaboration of this point."--Journal of the American Musicological Society