Mozart: Overture to revolution. By Paul McGarr. (London: Redwords, 2001). (Series: Revolutionary Portraits; ).
First published in International Socialism Journal no. 52, Autumn 1991, pp. 95-128.
Transcribed by Jørgen Lund for Marxisme Online, 28 January 2006, from International Socialism 52.
Mozart is a modern-day icon, worshipped as an incomparable artistic genius utterly divorced from the social struggles of his day. Paul McGarr gives us a different Mozart, no less gifted but more rooted in the social and political changes that shook the world as it hurtled towards the Great French Revolution of 1789.