What does a biographer owe the general reader? And what is a G.R. anyway? In Robert Gutman’s sumptuously produced “Mozart: A Cultural Biography” (1999), he refers to the “nonspecialist” and the “layman,” who may wish to “pass over”his “excursions into cultural, musical, and traditional history … without loss of biographical continuity.” In other words, the G.R. craves the life story and has to be seduced into other concerns that will yield, Mr. Gutman promises, “wider perceptions.”

The G.R.’s wishes came to mind while reading Oxford University Press’s description of Julian Rushton’s “Mozart” (Oxford University Press, 320 pages, $30), the newest addition to the Master Musicians series: “An engaging biography for general readers that will also be an informative resource for scholars.” Mr. Rushton, however, puts it quite differently: “My objective has been to supply an introduction and guide to Mozart’s output, usable for reference, with the appendices (calendar, worklist, and personalia) usual in the Master Musicians series.”

G.R.s will find Mr. Rushton’s biography a bore, I believe, precisely because it is not an engaging narrative and certainly no introduction, judging by language that refers to Mozart’s “output” (as if he were a musical machine) and passages that begin: “The opening four bars present the simplest elaboration of tonic harmony. The chromatic touch in bars 5-6 enhances the modulation to the dominant.” And it only gets more technical. The book was too much for me, a G.R. when it comes to music, since my credentials include a year of piano lessons when I was 12, six months on the trombone a few years later, and a rudimentary ability to read music (learned in high school and mostly now forgotten).

Mr. Gutman cajoles the G.R., whereas Mr. Rushton would prefer not to be biographical at all, concluding: “[N]obody would take the slightest interest in Mozart’s or his wife’s illnesses, his debts, his relationship with his father – still less would anyone have invented love-affairs for him, and theories of his being poisoned – if his music did not compel attention to the man behind it.”

This oft-expressed denigration of biography is absurd. We all invent very rich and imaginative lives for ourselves and others, regardless of what we achieve. Liza Doolittle was certain that “they” had (never mind the vague pronoun) “done in” one of her relatives. What elaborate scenarios we invent for our neighbors and nearest of kin – whether they can compose a note or not!

Although Mr. Gutman instructs us to attend to the music, notice how thoroughly the humanity of his subject has seduced the biographer:

The decades I have passed studying Mozart have rich recompense in both acquaintance with and loving admiration for this affectionate and generous man, an austere moralist of vital force, incisiveness, and strength of purpose who, though – like all -bearing the blame of faults and lapses, yet played his role in the human comedy with honor, engaging with grace the frustrations of his complicated existence: his goodness of heart, unaffected charm, winning ways, and self-humor run like gorgeous threads through its web.

This is what the G.R. is looking for: the measure of the man who made the music. Yet Mozart biography has a long history of discounting the man, making him into the myth of the eternal child, as Maynard Solomon writes in his acclaimed “Mozart: A Life” (1995).There was an antic, childlike quality in the composer, to be sure, Mr. Solomon acknowledges. But there is also a tradition of infantilizing him, of wishing him to remain the child prodigy his father Leopold cultivated and sought to control even as he matured.

Romanticism played Leopold’s hand, believing that the “child is father of the man,” and that musical talent (to paraphrase Hegel) can be expressed by empty heads. The philosopher had Mozart in mind, Mr. Solomon suggests, when Hegel wrote that “very great achievement in musical composition and performance [is] combined with considerable indigence of mind and character.” Enter Tom Hulce and his daffy and diverting impersonation of Mozart in the movie “Amadeus.”

So where, dear G.R., to find a book less demanding than Mr. Gutman’s and Mr. Solomon’s weighty works but still stimulating and in the 300-page range? Not Stanley Sadie’s “Mozart: The Early Years: 1756-1781” (W.W. Norton, 624 pages,$35), in which no major work and “very few minor ones are passed over without discussion in terms of both context and of the music itself.” Sadie, who did not live to complete the second volume, depsychologizes Mozart, calling him a “professional of his time, [who] never wrote a piece of music simply because he felt like it or because of some ‘inner need’ but virtually always because it was in some sense a requirement.” Me, I’d like to know more about the “virtually” and whether the quotation marks around “inner need” mean there is no such thing.

Sadie notes that it is “easy to criticize Leopold Mozart for his readiness to ‘exploit’ the talent of his children.”Indeed, Mr. Solomon uses that very word, and the somewhat more circumspect Mr. Gutman nevertheless refers to the father’s “raw opportunism.” Such interpretations, Sadie argues, are “misguided.The notion that it could in some way be damaging to the children [not only to Mozart but to his talented sister Nannerl] to be exhibited as they were [all over the courts of Europe] is a wholly modern one, representing attitudes to upbringing and child psychology that would have been incomprehensible to a man of the eighteenth century.”

But this defense of Leopold can only be maintained by ignoring Mr. Solomon’s powerful picture of the father’s lifelong efforts to infantilize his son, to deprive him of any emotional gratification outside of his family, and to convince Wolfgang that without his father he could not function as man or musician.

And here the G.R., still seeking that 300-page page-turner, might alight on Jane Glover’s “Mozart’s Women: The Man, the Music, and the Loves in His Life” (HarperCollins, 426 pages, $27.95). Although the enticing title might arouse suspicion – is this just a potboiling, bodice-ripping biography? – it is in fact a shrewdly told story by a longtime conductor of 18th-century music, including 25 years at Glyndebourne and with London’s Mozart Players.

Leopold receives no mercy from Ms. Glover. He is “tyrannical and paranoid,” a man of “staggering insensitivity” to women’s feelings. Cultural explanations of Leopold’s character do not wash with Ms. Glover. Leopold was a brute who kept his wife, Maria Anna, at home while he toured with Wolfgang and Nannerl. Leopold’s letters to Maria Anna are hectoring, while Wolfgang’s letters to both his mother and later to his sister (when she stopped touring) are generous and entertaining.

Mozart biographers make much of Mozart’s closeness to his father, emphasizing that Leopold was responding to, not coercing, his son’s genius. But it is the women, Ms. Glover maintains – especially his mother and sister, his wife, Constanze, and her three sisters – who made Mozart a man, providing him with emotional support and, in Constanze’s case, a business manager.

In a chapter devoted to the composer’s operas, Ms. Glover demonstrates how Mozart’s affinity with women resulted in a “penetrating understanding” of his female characters. A later chapter shows that it was the women in his life – chiefly Nannerl and Constanze – who worked hardest to preserve the documents and testimony that subsequently made Mozart biographies possible.

Ms. Glover’s biography is not based on new material; her interpretations are not original. Instead, she fulfills Mr. Gutman’s idea of a biography that realigns “materials into fresh and balanced configurations.” Her nemesis, Leopold Mozart, never fulfilled his desire to write a biography of his own son, but nevertheless has overshadowed Mozart biographers well into the 20th century. Now he has been bested – to his eternal horror – by a woman!

The cunning Ms. Glover ends her biography with a “Postlude,” an excerpt from a letter Mozart wrote to Gottfried von Jacquin on November 4, 1787. The words explicate the chain of affection and influence that helped make Mozart into the man she so admires:

My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who reported it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop. So I shall follow the advice of my sister, thanks to our mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and put a stop not only to my moral digression, but to my whole letter.

The same can be said of Ms. Glover’s matriarchal biography: She knows how to end a most diverting and perceptive narrative.

crollyson@nysun.com