Start with Maynard Solomon's Mozart, then read Julian Rushton's Mozart against it. That is not a misprint. Both books are catalogued under the bare title, and the reason this article names authors relentlessly is that Mozart on its own resolves to at least six different biographers. The path caps this stage at two and tells you whose they are; check the author before you buy anything on this subject.
The literature separates into three kinds of book that are easy to confuse — biography, musical study, and the catalogues and reference works that let you find a piece at all — and reading them as though they were one shelf is why so many people give up. This path keeps them apart: two biographies, then the letters, then the life in sequence, then the music, then the apparatus.
Two biographies, two methods
Solomon's is the major psychological biography, built on the father-son relationship and on a sceptical rereading of the family's own documents, including evidence that Leopold shaped the record. Some musicologists think it reads motive into evidence further than the evidence supports. It is the right opening book precisely because it argues rather than narrates. Rushton's is the Master Musicians volume — a musicologist's life-and-works, cautious where Solomon is bold, and considerably better on what the pieces are doing. Read it second, as the corrective.
The letters
Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life is Robert Spaethling's selection and the best English version for a general reader, because he keeps Mozart's registers — the puns, the dialect, the obscenity — instead of tidying them into eighteenth-century politeness. The Letters of Mozart and His Family is Emily Anderson's complete scholarly edition, 1,064 pages, and the source every biographer cites. Read Spaethling for pleasure and go to Anderson when you need the full text of a letter or its date. Anderson is markedly more decorous, which is worth knowing when you compare the two.
The life in sequence
MOZART: THE EARLY YEARS, 1756-1781 is Stanley Sadie's unfinished study of everything up to the break with Archbishop Colloredo — the child tours, the Salzburg employment, the early operas — in far more detail than any single-volume life can afford. It is stored in our catalogue in capitals, exactly as shown.
Mozart, the golden years, 1781-1791 is H. C. Robbins Landon on the Vienna decade: the concertos, the Da Ponte operas, the freemasonry and the money. Landon did more than anyone to correct the story of Mozart's supposed destitution. Mozart in Vienna is Simon Keefe's modern scholarly account of the same years, 717 pages, using later archival work and far less inclined to narrative colour. Read the two where they disagree; the disagreements are the real state of the field.
Close the stage with Landon's month-by-month reconstruction of the final year, titled simply 1791, which dismantles the Salieri story and the anonymous-messenger legend around the Requiem commission. You will not watch the film the same way afterwards.
The music itself
These are studies of particular bodies of work, written for readers with the recordings or the scores in front of them. None is meant to be read cold. Mozart's operas is Daniel Heartz on Idomeneo, the Da Ponte operas and Die Zauberflote, combining source study with dramatic analysis, and it is the most rewarding book here if opera is what brought you. Mozart and his piano concertos is Cuthbert Girdlestone's concerto-by-concerto study — old-fashioned in its language, still unmatched in coverage. Mozart's Requiem is Christoph Wolff on what Mozart actually wrote, what Sussmayr completed, and what the surviving manuscripts show: the documented answer to the question all the myths are built around.
Reference, and the world he worked in
The Cambridge Mozart encyclopedia, edited by Cliff Eisen and Simon Keefe, is the practical companion — short signed articles on works, people, places and controversies. Keep it within reach rather than reading it through.
Kochel's thematic catalogue is on the path so that the apparatus is visible rather than assumed, since it is the source of every K number. Be clear about what you would be buying: Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis is a German-language reference work, not reading, and our record is an early twentieth-century edition of an 1862 catalogue revised many times since.
End with Mozart and the Enlightenment, in which Nicholas Till reads the operas as arguments about truth, virtue and power in late eighteenth-century thought — the context both the biographies and the musical studies tend to leave implicit.
The full ordered path, with every record and its length, is at the Mozart reading path.
