Sounds & Fury

A Neat Summing Up

Published in a most unlikely journal, here's a neat if fairly conventional summing up at the close of this Mozart Year of Mozart as man and composer by Jon Pott for the Christian review, Books & Culture. I especially liked this quote from Catholic theologian, Hans Küng:

I think that music which speaks the truth is not just limited, say, to vocal music or explicitly religious music; it also includes purely instrumental music—and especially the intimacy of many second movements. An abstract masterpiece can speak the truth in the pure language of sound… . And though music cannot become a religion of art, the art of music is the most spiritual of all symbols for that "mystical sanctuary of our religion," the divine itself. In other words, for me Mozart's music has relevance for religion not only where religious and church themes or forms emerge, but precisely through the compositional technique of the non-vocal, purely instrumental music, through the way in which this music interprets the world, a way which transcends extra-musical conceptuality… . With keen ears [one] may perceive in the pure, utterly internalized sound, for example, of the adagio of the Clarinet Concerto, which embraces us without using any words, something wholly other… . So here are ciphers, traces of transcendence.

And this, from the inimitable George Bernard Shaw:

In the ardent regions where all the rest are excited and vehement, Mozart alone is completely self-possessed: where they are clutching their bars with a grip of iron and forging them with Cyclopean blows, his gentleness of touch never deserts him: he is considerate, economical, practical under the same pressure of inspiration that throws your Titan into convulsions. This is the secret of his unpopularity with Titan fanciers. We all in our native barbarism have a relish for the strenuous: your tenor whose B flat is like the bursting of a boiler always brings down the house, even when the note brutally effaces the song: and the composer who can artistically express in music a transport of vigor and passion of a more muscular kind … is always a hero with the intemperate in music. [...] Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him.

A worthwhile read.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

On Requiems

Here's a gem from New York Times music critic Bernard Holland.

No other kind of music boasts such ignorance of its subject matter. Composers can only stand on their side of the grave and address the guessing games shared by those around them.

—Bernard Holland, speaking of composed Requiems in a piece for The New York Times

Only Communists Do That

Blogger Alex of Wellsung enters the perennial clapping- / no-clapping-between-movements fray.

[D]espite the opinion of some that clapping between movements is a sort of trick the sand/head[-]bound classical elite uses to keep the potential prole Beethoven lovers in the dark, I feel I must reaffirm that inter-movement silence should be seen as progress in concert protocol, not some snobby t[r]ick to be eliminated.

Precisely. Just as we declared in this post of not quite two years ago.

And as Alex reminds us, referencing a billboard poster proclaiming the sinister truth: "Only communists clap between movements."

Show Stealer

I just heard a taped Salzburg Festival concert in honor of Mozart's 250th that had Anna Netrebko singing ... no, that's not quite right ... possessing Elettra in her raging Act III aria from Idomeneo, and I think I now understand what I never before could: why Callas freaks became Callas freaks.

And this doesn't hurt one little bit, either:

I need to take a cold shower now, I think.

Or something.

The Mind Reels At The Possibilities

For regular readers of this blog, the following comment will come as something of a shock, but in the music section of this Sunday's New York Times Arts & Leisure section, chief music critic Anthony Tommasini has a first-rate piece on Mozart with much of which I find myself in complete agreement. To wit:

[L]ike Mozart lovers everywhere, I’ve been hearing a lot of his music in this Mozart year, the 250th anniversary of his birth, and two trends in the later works, two paths Mozart seemed to be exploring, jump out at me.

One suggests where Mozart was heading as an opera composer. By the time of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così Fan Tutte,” the three masterpieces he wrote with his librettist sidekick Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart had become a master of the theater. Among other achievements, in these works he transformed the comic-opera genre into a vehicle for sublime, complex and profound dramas. That Mozart so deftly balanced comic and tragic elements in these works is wondrous enough. What stands out more is the emotional ambiguity that comes through in scene after scene, thanks to Mozart’s uncannily elusive music.

[...]

The other compositional trend in Mozart’s late works is harder to grasp and difficult to describe. It involves his increasing preoccupation with motifs and the technique usually called motivic development.

Motivic development, which reached a zenith in Viennese Classicism, allows a composer to generate an entire score from a small pool of motifs, the little components that make up a theme or a phrase. These components can be a cell of pitches, a snippet of a melody, a short rhythmic figure.

[...]

Composing music this way did not come naturally to Mozart. He had an intuitive gift for melody, a keen ear for searching harmony and a hard-won but complete mastery of contrapuntal writing that allowed him to tuck intricate, multivoice passages into his operas, even in the midst of some bustling comic ensemble. Yet he was by nature a man of the theater. His piano concertos come across like operas for instruments, as do many of his piano sonatas. Generating a string quartet or a symphony through the technique of motivic development took a special sort of focus and effort.

[...]

[I]n the summer of 1788, Mozart worked simultaneously on his last three symphonies: No. 39 in E flat, No. 40 in G minor and No. 41 in C (“Jupiter”). [...] Why did he undertake them? ... [M]y guess is that he wanted finally to come to terms with this matter of motivic development.

His work paid off. Almost every bit of the G minor Symphony, for example, can be heard as emanating from the motifs that make up the first phrases of the first movement....

These matters are difficult to describe in words. The point is that for all its tumultuous shifts, this symphony sounds inexorable and of a piece from beginning to end. Mozart worked long and hard to make it so.

I think I can imagine where Mozart was heading as a theater composer. But with this business of motivic development and the symphony he was just getting started. What a loss. Forget reaching his sister’s age. If only he had made it to 50.

If only, indeed. It's long been a deeply held and cherished conceit of mine that had Mozart lived to reach his sister's age at death before death too overtook him, he would have made Wagner entirely unnecessary as an operatic innovator having long before Wagner began writing his two theoretical treatises on opera — Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) of 1849, and Oper und Drama of 1851 — already firmly established music-drama as opera's new form and ultimate realization.

A Mozart music-drama — a music-drama as Wagner ultimately conceived music-drama. The mind reels at just the thought of the transcendent possibilities.

Goldovsky, Mozart, and Wagner: A Moment Briefly Revisited

I once, in the mid-'70s, had occasion to lunch with the great Boris Goldovsky — famous for his Metropolitan Opera broadcast intermission features, and general manager, dramaturge, director, and music director of his own opera company — at his New York City studio (a half-gruesome, half-comic tale in its own right which I'll relate in a subsequent entry on this blog),* and over lunch opera was, of course, the subject of conversation. Goldovsky loved all opera, needless to say, but had a bit of a monomania concerning Mozart whom he insisted on referring to as He Who Was Not Of Woman Born. In short, Goldovsky was a near-worshipper of Mozart.

Eventually, we got around to discussing Wagner, and at just the mention of the name, Goldovsky turned his face toward the ceiling, threw his arms up in a sort of helpless gesture (Goldovsky was a native Russian, and, well, you know just how emotional Russians can get, especially after tucking away three or four shot glasses filled with lethal-strength vodka), and declared passionately in a vodka-thickened Russian accent which I here won't even attempt to mimic, "Wagner!, Wagner! He consumes me!"

I at first thought he was merely engaging in a bit of stage business to create a dramatic moment to precede some point he wanted to make. But it was no stage business. The man looked positively stricken.

I, of course, was stunned speechless, and my astonishment must have shown on my face because he quickly caught hold of himself and, poised and quietly, explained, "Every time I conduct Wagner the world disappears, and for days after, all other opera seems nothing but shit. Verdi is shit. Puccini is shit. Tchaikovsky is shit. Even Beethoven is shit. And...," and here he paused, leaned his face close to mine, lowered his voice conspiratorially, and with genuine distress written over all his features, he, in hoarse, shamefaced whisper declared," and, Mozart...even Mozart is shit."

I then understood him perfectly.

Indeed I did — and still do.

---

* That half-gruesome, half-comic tale can now be read here.

Ave Atque Vale, Elisabeth

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:08 AM Eastern on 4 Aug. See below.]

Stellar German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died at her home in western Austria early this morning at the age of 90.

Ave atque vale, Elisabeth. Atque in perpetuum.

AP obituary can be read here.

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Update (2:08 AM Eastern on 4 Aug): A splendid obituary in The [London] Times.

Ross Does Mozart

New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise does Mozart:

In a jubilee year, when all the old Mozart myths come rising out of the ground where scholars have tried to bury them, the usefulness of “Don Giovanni” is that it puts a stake through the heart of the chocolate-box Mozart, the car-radio Mozart, the Mozart-makes-you-smarter Mozart. If the opera were played in bus stations or dentists’ waiting rooms, it would spread fear. It would probably cause perversion in infants. No matter how many times you hear the punitive D-minor chord with which the opera begins, or the glowering diminished seventh that heralds the arrival of the stone statue of the Commendatore (“Don Giovanni, you invited me to dinner, and I have come”), it generates a certain mental panic. Mozart’s harmonies of disaster are all the more terrifying because they break through the frame of what purports to be a saucy comedy about an aristocratic seducer — a successor to “Figaro.” The fact that “Figaro” is actually quoted in the score — “Non più andrai” is one of the airs that the Don enjoys at dinner, just before the Commendatore arrives — suggests that Mozart is consciously subverting his reputation as a supplier of ambient musical pleasure.

[...]

“Don Giovanni,” which is many people’s choice for the greatest opera ever written, ends with something like a humble gesture: it dissolves its own aura of greatness. Having marched us to the brink of Heaven and Hell, Mozart abruptly pulls us back, implying that, in the manner of Shakespeare’s epilogues, all is show, a pageant melting into air. “I’m just the composer, I don’t have any answers,” he seems to say. “Life goes on!” And he walks away at a rapid pace, his red coat flapping behind him.

RTWT here.

And The Mystery Guest Is...

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 1:32 PM Eastern on 10 Jul. See below.]

Do you recognize anyone in this photo, c. 1840?

No? No cause for embarrassment. There's no reason you should, actually. It's the just discovered and only photograph (copied from a daguerreotype) of none other than Mozart's widow, Constanze, age 78, seen in the photo at front left.

Details here.

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Update (9:54 PM Eastern on 7 Jul): Or maybe not. Agnes Selby, author of Constanze, Mozart's Beloved writes:

I am terribly sorry to disappoint people ..., but this is certainly not Constanze but someone's aunt.

The whole story was concocted by Keller's grandson. I[n] Australia we refer to such rantings as "dropping names". If with good luck for the name dropper the press gets hold of it, fame for the name dropper ensues.

Constanze Mozart was crippled by arthritis by 1840 and died in 1842. There is absolutely no way she could have traveled to visit Maximillian Keller during the period when the photograph was taken. Contrary to the statements made in the newspaper, Constanze had no contact with Keller since 1826. There is no evidence that she had corresponded with him or visited him.

Read the rest here.

Update 2 (1:32 PM Eastern on 10 Jul): We've received an informative eMail from Dr. Michael Lorenz, Institute of Musicology, University of Vienna, which eMail we, with permission, reprint below. Our thanks to Dr. Lorenz.

Dear Mr. Douglas,

The "newly discovered" picture of Constanze Mozart has already been published twice in the 1950s, the last time in an article by E. H. Mueller von Asow in the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, March 1958, p. 93. For decades it has been known as a hoax among Mozart experts. There are no outdoor photographs of groups of people dating from 1840, because the lenses invented by Joseph Petzval, which were to make such portraits possible, were not available yet. It was simply not possible in 1840 to take sharp outdoor pictures of people as long as the necessary exposure time still amounted to about three minutes. The first outdoor portraits of human beings originate from the 1850s and the picture in question definitely looks like an amateur snapshot from the 1870s. If the BBC (or anyone else) knows a verified group portrait originating from 1840, I would like to see it. But the guys in Altötting wanted to have their share of fun and publicity in the Mozart-year.

Sincerely,

Dr. Michael Lorenz
Institute of Musicology
University of Vienna

Dr. Lorenz also supplies a link to this corroborating document (i.e., corroborating the initial claim of authenticity).

A Very Dangerous Fellow

Richard Wagner has been thoroughly excoriated by the postmodern crop of scholarly music historians for, among other things, his extreme German nationalism, the impetus and ground for that excoriation a poisonous artifact of Wagner having been for Adolph Hitler a true German hero (Hitler considered Wagner one of "three of our greatest Germans," the other two being Martin Luther and Frederick the Great), and the consequent false coupling of Wagner's name and thinking with the Nazis. These professional Wagner-bashers are especially — and absurdly — fond of adducing as a "proof" of the virulency of Wagner's German nationalism the final monologue of Hans Sachs, one of the protagonists of Wagner's opera, Die Meistersinger, the closing lines of which read:

Beware! Evil tricks threaten us:
if the German people and kingdom should one
day decay under a false, foreign rule
soon no prince would understand his people;
and foreign mists with foreign vanities
they would plant in our German land,
what is German and true none would know, if it
did not live in the honor of the German Masters.
Therefore I say to you:
honor your German Masters,
then you will conjure up good spirits!
And if you favor their endeavors,
even if the Holy Roman Empire
should dissolve in mist,
for us there would remain
holy German Art!

Compare that with the following, taken not from the text of one of Wagner's operas, but from a letter:

At this point I cannot give you any news about the future of the German Opera; things are rather quiet in this area, except for the renovations that are carried out at the K___ Theater intended for a German stage. The opening is supposed to be in the beginning of October, but I, for my part, have no great hope that it will go well. Judging from what's happened so far, it seems to me that they are more intent on destroying the German Opera ... than on revitalizing and maintaining it. My [German] sister-in-law ... is the only singer permitted to join the German Opera. C___, A___, [and] T___, all of them Germans of whom Germany can be proud, are obliged to stay with the Italian theater, and will be made to compete against singers from their own country! If we had only one director with a sense of patriotism everything would acquire a different face! But it also might mean that the National Theater, which began to sprout so handsomely, would actually bear some fruit, and it would certainly be an everlasting embarrassment for Germany if we Germans had the audacity to act as Germans, think as Germans, speak in German, and perhaps even sing in German!!!

Please forgive me, dearest Herr P___, if I have gone too far in expressing my true sentiments! Wholly convinced that I am speaking to a true German, I have allowed my tongue free rein, which is so rarely possible these days that one might well get drunk after such an outpouring of the heart....

Now that's as bald an expression of German nationalism as could be wished for by anyone looking for such evidence with which to damn the writer, and a direct personal expression of it into the bargain rather than taken at second-hand from the text of one of the writer's operas. Problem for these postmodern Wagner-bashers, however, is that the letter wasn't written by Richard Wagner. It was written by one, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

A very dangerous fellow that Mozart, surely, and one whose life ought to be reassessed in the light of his clearly virulent German nationalistic sympathies.

[Note: English translation of Mozart's letter by Robert Spaethling from his, Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life. The proper-name ellipses employed for the express purpose of avoiding perhaps telegraphing the punch line are mine.]

Belated Thought

Belatedly, it occurs to me that the Boy Wonder noted in this post would do admirable, even superb, service as the Waldvogel in Wagner's Siegfried, a role always sung by an adult female coloratura soprano, but intended originally by Wagner to be sung by a boy soprano.

All opera companies, take note.

Amazing

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:24 PM Eastern on 23 Feb. See below.]

Just caught up with this. And jaw-dropping amazing it is, too. Puts to shame 90% of coloraturas who have the balls to even attempt this impossible aria.

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Update (4:24 PM Eastern on 23 Feb): See here for a belated thought.

Sunday Morning: The TV Show

CBS's Sunday Morning has been, since its inception some 27 years ago (1979), one of my very few "appointment" TV shows. In Sunday mornings gone by, it was something of a cultural oasis on network TV with regular culture segments on out-of-the-mainstream people, places, and things, including regular segments on classical music (hosted by flutist Eugenia Zukerman, ex-wife of violinist-violist-conductor Pinchas Zukerman); jazz (hosted by jazz pianist Billy Taylor); and books, cinema, and TV (by brainy culture critic and writer, John Leonard).

No more, and not for some time now. Now it's pop culture crap all the way, much of it PR-driven, with occasional culture segments on the world of the visual and plastic arts, which in the last decade or two has, in a way, become part of pop culture in the sense that it's become an In Thing for the bourgeois yuppie crowd.

Consider today's Sunday Morning culture segments, for instance. They were on the turn-of-the-century Viennese painter, Egon Schiele; on C&W singer, Rosanne Cash, daughter of the late Johnny Cash (a regular chip off the ol' block, she is, with the difference that, unlike her papa, she can actually sing somewhat); on a 10-year-old, Oakland, California Black kid who's become a big hit in Oakland's Chinatown singing in his Chinatown elementary school's productions of Chinese opera; and not a word, not so much as a fleeting mention, of the 250th anniversary of the birth of one, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

O tempora! O mores!

But Sunday Morning is not entirely without redeeming features. There are two things that make the show worthwhile tuning into if only to browse (I always tape the show so that I can fast-forward through the always intrusive network TV commercials, and lately, through most of the segments): the myriad and always beautiful "sun image" illustrations which begin and end the show and each of its segments, and the playing of the show's opening theme — the Baroque trumpet fanfare, "Abblasen", attributed to trumpeter and composer Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734) — by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis on a Baroque piccolo trumpet, which playing is, I can say without fear of provoking any meaningful dissent, the most pure, the most beautiful, the most perfect trumpet playing you're ever likely to encounter anywhere.

As for the rest of it, score another victory for that ubiquitous monster: pop culture.

Unexpected

I listened this afternoon, via WQXR, to the live broadcast from Salzburg, Germany of the offical gala inaugural concert (just finished) of this Mozart Year, as it's been dubbed, celebrating on this day 250 years ago the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The concert was nicely programmed — a piano concerto (#25 with pianist Mitsuko Uchida), the Sinfonia Concertante (with Gidon Kremer and Yuri Bashmet), several concert arias and several numbers from Le Nozze and Don Giovanni (with singers Thomas Hampson and Cecilia Bartoli), and a symphony (#35, the "Haffner"), all with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Ricardo Muti (why Muti was chosen to do conducting honors is beyond me) — and I found myself enjoying every bit of it having earlier made the decision to lock my critical faculty in the closet for the duration, so to speak.

I was entirely unprepared, however, for the ringing of the church bells of all Salzburg's churches at precisely 8:00 PM (2:00 PM EST) — the official time of Mozart's birth as noted by his proud papa — and the frisson of emotion and surprise on hearing them literally made the hair rise up on the back of my neck.

But that was as nothing compared with when the Vienna Singverein joined the Vienna Philharmonic to sing, "Heil sei euch, Geweihten", the glorious final chorus from Die Zauberflöte, to close the concert (also a surprise to me):

Hail to you on your consecration!
You have penetrated the night,
Thanks be given to you, Osiris, thanks to you Isis!
Strength has triumphed,
Rewarding beauty and wisdom with an everlasting crown!

At that point, I'm afraid I lost it — totally.

Helluva excuse for a Real Man I am.

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang! 

Mozart: Composer, Dramatist, Spirit Of The World-spirit

The four great operas of Mozart all show paradigmatically how strongly music can mould dramatic form. The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro show further how such dramatic form can articulate a consistent, profound action. In these masterpieces, all of Mozart's eloquence and strength, his faultless response to action, his control over the dramaturgical wealth of the ensemble, his sensitivity to character in the aria, his famous ingenuity, sympathy, delicacy, and humor, his superb sense of artistic form on every level — all this is fired to cast a single dramatic conception. One cannot very well describe such a conception without lapsing into platitudes; one can find words more easily for operas like Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte, wherein the dramatic ideas are half-formed or unresolved despite very great beauties. But where the dramatist has been successful, the idea cannot be defined except as the work itself. The meaning of a complete work of art will be manifested only in the medium that realizes, consummates, or creates it. The vindication of opera as drama comes in such occasional, unique triumphs; and among these, Mozart has left our most precious examples.

—Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 1988, University of California Press

On the evidence of the Da Ponte operas and Die Zauberflöte, Mozart is one of those rare creative beings who comes to disturb the sleep of the world. He was put on earth, it seems, not merely to provide an anodyne to sorrow and an antidote to loss, but to trouble our rest, to remind us that all is not well, that neither the center nor the perimeter can hold, that things are not what they seem to be, that masquerade and reality may well be interchangeable, that love is frail, life transient, faith unstable. [...] Mozart's [dramatic] universe is itself uncertain, a maze of doorways to the unknown and the unexpected. Everywhere there are dislocations, fissures, tears, and weak spots; cynicism and disillusionment ... permeate his resolutions, corrupt his happy endings. [...] For [Mozart], the beneficence of the Creation was not self-evident, or, at least, it was necessary to reconcile it with the stations of the Cross. Tranquility must be earned, not ratified or colluded in. Evil persists even after the music has had its say.

—Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life, 1995, HarperCollins Publishers

Mozart's influence transcends history. Each generation see something different in his work. [...] Mozart's music, which to so many of his contemporaries still seemed to have the brittleness of clay, has long since been transformed into gold, gleaming in the light, though it takes on a different luster for each new generation. Without it each generation would be infinitely poorer. No earthly remains of Mozart survived save a few wretched portraits, no two of which are alike; the fact that all the reproductions of his death-mask, which would have shown him as he really was, have crumbled to bits seems symbolic. It is as though the world-spirit wished to show that here is pure sound, conforming to a weightless cosmos, triumphant over all chaotic earthliness, spirit of the world-spirit.

—Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work, 1945, Oxford University Press

Mozart The Practical Musician

I still have 2 concertos to write to complete my subscription concerts [Mozart wrote three piano concertos for these subscription concerts: K413-K415]. These concertos are a happy medium between what's too difficult and too easy. They are brilliant, pleasing to the ear, natural without becoming vacuous. There are passages here and there that only connoisseurs can fully appreciate, yet the common listener will find them satisfying as well, although without knowing why.

[...]

[I]n addition [to the two piano concertos and a piano version of the Singspiel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail], I'm working on a quite difficult assignment; namely, an Ode to Gibraltar by [Johann Michael] Denis. It's a commission by a Hungarian Lady who wants to keep this a secret and present it to Denis as a tribute. The ode is sublime, beautiful, anything you want, but it's too exaggerated and bombastic for my fastidious ears. But what is one to do! The middle thing — the truth in all things — is no longer known and appreciated. To earn applause, one has to compose things that are so simpleminded that a coachman can sing them after hearing them just once, or so complicated that they please precisely because no sensible person can understand them.

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a letter to his father, 28 December 1782

A Pianist Offers Some Pianistic Advice

You must not place yourself in the middle of the piano, but way up at the trebels, for in this way you have a better chance of flinging your body around and making all sorts of grimaces. You roll your eyes and smirk. When a passage occurs twice, you play it slower the 2nd time; if it comes around a 3rd time, you play it slower still; and when playing a passage you must lift your arm as high as you can, and if the passage requires emphasis, the arm and not the fingers must do this and do it with great purpose and heaviness.... She [Augsburg prodigy pianist, Nanette Stein] is eight and a half years old and she is now learning everything by heart; she has a chance of getting somewhere, for she has real talent; but she won't succeed if she continues this way. She simply won't get the necessary rapidity because she does everything she can to make her hand heavy. She will never be able to get what is most essential and difficult and the principal thing in music: the right tempo, for she has since the earliest youth completely neglected to play in time. Herr Stein [Nanette's father] and I have talked at least 2 hours about this very point. I have pretty much convinced him. He now asks my advice in everything. He used to be very taken by Becché. Now he sees and hears that I can do better than Becché, and that I am not making any grimaces when I play, and yet I play with much expression, and no one — these are his words — has ever played his piano forte as well as I have, and, besides, I always keep correct time. They are all wondering about that. They simply can't believe that you can play a Tempo Rubato in an Adagio, and the left hand knows nothing about it but goes on playing in strict time. As far as they know, the left hand always follows the right....

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a letter to his father, 23-25 October 1777

Even More On Mozart

Political Science professor Fred Baumann writes in The Weekly Standard:

Holding together with apparently effortless ease the most intensely characterized opposites is, to me, the essential quality of Mozart's music and the state of mind it engenders. Another operatic example is the famous quintet in the first act of Cosi Fan Tutte where, to the most soaring and blissful music, two couples of lovers mourn the departure of the men for war, while an elderly cynic (who, for a bet with the two men, is merely setting up a test of the women's fidelity) mutters that he'll die if he can't start laughing.

This is not mere ironic deflation of romantic pretensions. Just as we know the protestations of eternal love to be foolish, we feel their present truth and feel pity for the vulnerability they reveal. There is a similar moment at the end of Le Nozze di Figaro, where the countess pardons the count, in which much-betrayed, but still-loving, mercy balances perfectly with resignation and bitter necessity.

We get it. We feel all of it. No comment is needed.

RTWT here.

Mozart The Magician

In a mostly spot-on piece, Joshua Kosman of The San Francisco Chronicle writes:

The mathematician Mark Kac, in describing the visionary physicist Richard Feynman, identified two types of geniuses: the ordinary kind and what he called the "magicians."

"An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done, it is completely dark."

Mozart, like Feynman, was a magician.

RTWT here.