William Beckford: Composing for Mozart

This biography documents the colourful life of William Beckford, who scandalized Victorian society by indulging in homoerotic and paedophile activities until the Tory administration exiled him. In his absence his nihilistic Arabian novel "Vathek" was pirated by a treacherous friend. Beckford spent his declining years in adventures abroad, and built a Gothic masterpiece, Fontwell Abbey, where he bathed in the rain with a sylph-like Albanian footman. Reared in exotic isolation, Beckford grew up obsessed with dark grottoes, towers and awful images of the living dead. His life was a tragicomedy of a wealthy bisexual, who invented a forgery of elegant half-truths invented in retirement after the young Disraeli had sent him a homerotic epic based on his career. The faked letters and dream encounters with celebrities have led to the term "composing for Mozart".