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.