The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993

By Anthony Burgess and Paul Phillips

The Devil Prefers Mozart is the first comprehensive collection of Anthony Burgess's writings about music. In this extensive compilation of essays and reviews, he covers a vast range of musical topics, from the hurdy-gurdy to Beatlemania and the Sex Pistols, with Burgess's love of English music represented by writings on Elgar, Holst, and Delius. There are essays on Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz and Wagner and other great composers from Monteverdi to Weill, as well as writings about Burgess's favourite performers, including Yehudi Menuhin, Larry Adler and John Sebastian. Whether whimsical ('Food and Music'), satirical ('Anybody Can Conduct') or controversial ('Why Punk Had to End in Evil'), Burgess's writing is consistently informative and entertaining.
The music of Debussy sparked Burgess's musical imagination so powerfully when he was a boy in Manchester that he composed his first symphony at eighteen years of age and aspired to a career as a professional composer until his mid-thirties. Writings about his own music provides valuable information about many of Burgess's compositions, including his Symphony in C, his works for guitar quartet, and his opera Blooms of Dublin based on Joyce's Ulysses.
Carcanet also publishes The Ink Trade, a companion volume of literary essays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lives and Letters
• Release date: Jan 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781800173095

Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. From 1954 to 1960 he was stationed in Malaysia as an education officer and during this time he started writing The Malayan Trilogy. He was an author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. Diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour in 1959, Burgess became a full-time writer and went on to write a book a year up until his death in 1993. His many works include: The Complete Enderby, Tremor of Intent and The Kingdom of the Wicked, as well as works for the stage such as Blooms of Dublin: A Musical Play Based On James Joyce's Ulysses (1986), and an adaptation of his own novel, A Clockwork Orange, produced in 1987.