With imagery easing from lavish Viennese interiors to portraits of Mozart’s penetrating, ever-youthful gaze, and commentary progressing seamlessly from his letters to impassioned expert analysis, the documentary “In Search of Mozart” is too canny to call itself “In Praise of …” The film’s splendid musical materials, which are examined by the opera soloists Ian Bostridge and Gerald Finley, the pianists Imogen Cooper and Leif Ove Andsnes, and numerous others, help make “In Search of Mozart” a meditation on brilliance and verve, presenting a fresh take on the man who may have best embodied both those traits.

Incisive and raring to please, Phil Grabsky’s film, which opens today at Cinema Village, melds an emotional travelog with artistic chronology, its musical selections illustrating both the composer’s progress and the abiding passions that waft through the film’s two-hour length. Mozart experts speak with striking limberness, and in a film genre in which music often functions as billboard or mile-marker, the closely filmed chamber recitals, touching keyboard demonstrations by Lada Valesova and Ronald Brautigam, and opera scenes featuring Renée Fleming sate the ears and incite curiosity.

Mozart’s early life as a prodigy is narrated by stage the stage veteran Juliet Stevenson, who gives way to a cast of engaging commentators (director Jonathan Miller and Mostly Mozart conductor Louis Langrée weigh in admirably). Mr. Grabsky (“The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan”) has done his own filming, filling frames with interview subjects as personable as they are authoritative.

He also creates witty visual bridges: As Leopold Mozart carts his family around Europe for three years, exposing his gifted boy to Handel, Hayden, and J.S. Bach, the director segues passing landscapes into familiar freeway traffic. (One flurried montage is less effective once Mozart, in his early 20s, forays to Paris with his mother.)

Bayan Northcott speculates that “the true Mozart breaks through rather late, because he had this huge expertise — he’d composed full-length operas, he’d composed 28 symphonies by the age of 18.” Then music aglow with charm takes a deeply visceral plunge, with opinions varying as to the first signatory Mozart composition (Mr. Northcott tags Symphony No. 29; another interviewee elects Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat).

Performance clips illuminate settings that include a resonant Amsterdam church, and passages flow from choral, symphonic, and operatic masterworks completed within Mozart’s grueling work and family schedule. The end comes at age 35 while wrestling with the immense “Requiem” — too soon, as is ever the case with Mozart.

“I did 100 interviews, and filmed 80 live performances,” Mr. Grabsky said, “and once things got past the logistics and agents and I was talking to the performers, they were fantastically enthusiastic. Renée Fleming gave me an interview at the opera house in Paris, where she was performing that evening; she paused while talking about ‘Don Giovanni,’ and a huge burst of thunder cracked outside. It was also a thrill being in the pit with the Vienna Philharmonic, and attending rehearsals with the Orchestra of the 18th Century. In Dubrovnik, I filmed two of today’s finest young violinists, Janine Jansen and Julian Rachlin.”

But it wasn’t all as easy as it sounds for the director to engage these masters of Mozart.

“I did have to chase Lang Lang a bit along the corridors of the Salzburg Concert Hall.”

Mozart rehearsed every single day from a very early age, along with his father, who was a great violinist and composer. It would be reasonable to make a film chronicling only his first 18 years, both because he had laid the foundation for his genius, and because his relationship with his father molded so much of what he would become. “In Search of Mozart” quotes extensively from their many letters before detailing their painful and ultimately unresolved break.

And though Mr. Grabsky loved “Amadeus,” Milos Forman’s 1984 Oscar-winning drama, “it’s in fact a film about [rival court composer] Salieri, and the burden of mediocrity. Mozart was not poisoned by Salieri, and his wife, Constanze, was not the character portrayed.” As Mr. Grabsky says of the woman who championed her husband’s music for decades after his death, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation if it weren’t for her.”

Mr. Grabsky also disputes the view that the Clarinet Concerto, made late in the composer’s career, is an acknowledgement of the composer’s mortality. “Especially in its slow second movement, it’s a love letter to his wife, who was away at that time,” he said. The concerto opens and closes the documentary, and was an early motivation for its being made.

As a boy, Mr. Grabsky would visit his older sister in Berlin, where his brother in law played the concerto as an amateur soloist. “Even at 7 or 8 years old,” he recalled, “I could recognize something of the beauty in that music.”