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“... Wolfgang Hildesheimer has certainly been around a lot. Born in Hamburg in 1916, he belongs to that generation of Germans whom fortune first inexorably divided into victims and perpetrators and then united as bewildered survivors. In 1934 he emigrated with his parents to England and thence to Palestine, where he was apprenticed to a master carpenter ...”

“... genre. It explores Mozart’s character with cheerfully acknowledged borrowings from Freud, but Hildesheimer’s use of psychoanalytic categories is so discreet as to remove his study from the ranks of psychobiographies. Though it speaks about Mozart’s compositions at satisfying length, it is certainly not an exercise in musicology – ...”

“... that such different authors as Pietro Citati, with his Vita Breve di Katherine Mansfield, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, with his Marbot, eine Biographie, should have turned to the Anglo-Saxon model in order to subvert it silently from the inside, multiplying its ambiguities and exploiting the secret possibilities of the genre. It may be that a new form ...”

“... this perspective concentrates on Mozart the dramatist far more than on Mozart the composer. Unlike Wolfgang Hildesheimer, whose brilliant biographical study of Mozart is absent from Brophy’s revised bibliography, she writes less as a professional musicologist than as a philosophical theatre critic. This is regrettable in some ways, for her ...”

“... evidence of Mozart’s capacity to feel deeply. So, Solomon’s Mozart is diametrically opposed to Hildesheimer’s Mozart, which appeared in German 18 years ago and provided Peter Shaffer with a congenial source for the elaboration of Amadeus, later to be loudly amplified by Forman’s film. Hildesheimer drew a picture of ...”