Meetings with Mozart

Description

Mozart's genius, fiery energy, wonderful sense of fun and extraordinary musical output make for a fascinating life story. Meetings with Mozart taps into that with a parallel modern story focusing on Mozart's own credo: ‘Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together, go to the making of genius. Love, Love, Love. That is the soul of genius.’

Horace, a retired opera director, engages with a group of Mozart enthusiasts to help them discover his idol’s profound contribution to humanity – love.

Set in eastern South Africa, with its lush midlands, soaring mountains and arid bushveld, Meetings with Mozart vividly evokes the sense of time and place of its milieu: the fragrance of its flora, the music of its birdcalls, the torrential storms of its summers. The narrative interweaves the high – and the low – points of Mozart’s life and his music genius, with the lives of present-day characters.

William Charlton-Perkins, a journalist and columnist, is one of South Africa’s eminent opera connoisseurs. He grew up with his three siblings in the Natal Midlands, in a home that brimmed with their parents’ passion for the arts—a passion he inherited. A lapsed amateur pianist who has regarded Mozart as his musical deity since childhood, it is perhaps inevitable that Meetings with Mozart is his debut novel.