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.