As I closed the back cover of MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE, wishing incredibly that it might go on just a little longer than its 800-and-some pages, I suddenly realized that the hero of Jan Swafford’s amazing biography was just half my age when he died on December 5, 1791.

Had Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived beyond 35, a point at which the world already recognized him to have “arrived” as a consummate composing and performing artist, what further marvels might he have accomplished? Anyone who has written about this 18th-century child prodigy-turned-musical superhero has asked the same question in various forms, usually accompanied by far too much lament and baseless speculation.

Like his precursors from the early 19th century to the past decade, Swafford also could have milked the hypothetical “future Mozart” idea, but gives it an elegant pass every time it comes up. And thank goodness for that. There was simply so much packed into the short life Mozart actually led --- easily the equivalent of half-a-dozen hard-working musicians from any era.

Instead of hypothesizing, or further mythologizing a life whose true facts are far more interesting than popular fiction, Swafford dug deep into every conceivable fragment and tidbit of the Mozart family’s life and times, along with those of their friends, relatives, employers, rulers and influencers.

But what makes MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE yet another milestone in Swafford's series of substantial composer biographies (Charles Ives, 1996; Johannes Brahms, 1997; Ludwig van Beethoven, 2014), of which the shortest exceeds 500 pages, is his unique fusion of raw data with truthful storytelling and thoughtful extrapolation. Orchestrating words and themes as deftly as any of the composers he so vividly has revealed to date (who will be next, we wonder?), Swafford transforms a deluge of available information into imaginative yet fact-based contexts that reveal Mozart’s talent in a down-to-earth and memorably human way.

"[W]hat makes MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE yet another milestone in Swafford's series of substantial composer biographies...is his unique fusion of raw data with truthful storytelling and thoughtful extrapolation."

While keeping to a broad chronological structure, Swafford creates a very real-time environment in which multiple events --- domestic, personal, artistic, political, historical --- continually collide and interweave. That's life happening. Mozart was no solitary genius, in fact quite the opposite. His life was simultaneously lived in the moment and at great depth. The book’s many detours into the affairs of his bossy father Leopold, submissive but practical mother Maria Anna, and talented but suppressed older sister Nannerl, as well as the comings and goings of numerous friends, colleagues, rivals and aristocratic employers, all reflect many facets of themselves and the prodigious talent at the center of this musical vortex.

Interspersed among segments of the composer’s life, MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE includes numerous portrayals of individual works. To keep his biography less technical but still substantial enough to reach every level of music lover, Swafford completely dispensed with illustrative score fragments and chose the higher, far more difficult road (for the writer, not the reader) of intimately describing the mood, tonal color and structure of many celebrated pieces.

In deft, empathic and knowledgeable prose, he treats a piano concerto here, an aria there, a string quartet or opera scene somewhere else, as lovingly as one might describe a dear friend: all as unique “personalities,” entirely formed within the reader’s receptive imagination. This is the great paradox of writing about music, which truly lives when being played and heard, yet whose individual notes last only as long as the vibrations of air will allow. Even Mozart’s voluminous scores were silent road maps, revealing his art only to those able to decipher and animate their particular language.

One of the biggest surprises to 21st-century readers with a reverence for history and its artifacts is just how ephemeral music could be in Mozart’s day, when score-copying was done entirely by hand and print publication was often too costly to invest in. Original manuscripts circulated among friends and working colleagues; some were cared for and returned to their creators, others pirated and appropriated under false names, still others lost or discarded.

Mozart wasn’t the only late-18th-century composer accustomed to dashing off chamber music, symphonies, cantatas and the like for single-use occasions, or at the most for a brief series of performances. At the time, last week’s scores were usually ignored like last week’s news. As Swafford reiterates a number of times, Mozart was always looking ahead to the next commissioned piece and typically had several scores on the go. In the end, although the disease or condition that killed him so young was never firmly established, Swafford sensibly suggests that it was a combination of prolonged overwork and incompetent doctors. Ironically, the next generation of composers and doctors heralded a different society, one in which the training and artifacts of both professions vastly increased in respect and value.

While it’s impossible to do justice to the sheer size and skilled density of MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE in the space of a single review, one can’t leave out another area in which Swafford excels in the art of reassessing the composer’s remarkable life. That was the women in it.

Instead of being ushered into the shadows of history, they are portrayed honestly and generously through their talents, intelligence, bravery, cunning, endurance and character. Whether in Vienna, Salzburg, Prague, Berlin, Paris or any number of European musical centers, it was no easy road for women to survive and excel as independent solo instrumental performers, professional singers, business managers, conductors, patrons, impresarios, musicians’ wives or mothers. Most notably, Swafford fleshes out Mozart’s stoic, opinionated and sensible wife Constanze, who would live well into the 19th century and revive a youthful singing career after her illustrious husband’s death.

Many readers will come to MOZART: THE REIGN OF LOVE with an enviable recognition of his many groundbreaking scores by name or catalogue number and perhaps imaginatively hear them while reading. But for the rest of us, who need to run to our recorded libraries after every chapter, the rewards of this unsurpassed Mozart biography will be just as delicious.