The
great Mozart is rightly counted as one of a handful of complete geniuses in the
history of music. Many see him as the greatest composer who ever lived, but my strong
objection to such a characterization is that one must not trifle with genius
by creating some kind of table of ranks among the members of this supreme
club, each of whom is unique, and the notion of a superior genius or an
inferior genius is utterly demeaning to the sterling quality of genius as such.
There
are very few geniuses whose divine essence could be as perfectly represented by
a title of their own creation as in the case of Mozart being himself the
quintessential Zauberflöte.
Mozart
is very different from Bach, although both of them are perfect representatives
of the Divine glory, but of its somewhat different attributes. Bach is the
perfect mind, and Mozart is the perfect spontaneous emotion. Not that either of
them is deficient in the other attributes, but it is one in particular, in each
case, that stands out and defines the nature of their genius.
Even
his formulaic pieces (and Mozart composed many of these) are studded with
inspirational diamonds, but there are also those which defy musicological
analysis. Don Giovanni in particular is an awe-inspiring opera. Not
surprisingly, Giuseppe Verdi’s best opera Don Carlos unabashedly
partakes in the eeriness of its own supernatural scenes of Mozart’s greatest
opera. (I am purposely avoiding the word “borrows,” for I do not consider
Verdi’s breathing in of Mozart’s electrically charged air as “borrowing”
that air.) And then, Mozart’s last unfinished masterpiece, the Requiem, seems
to be breaking even his own molds, surging into some wholly unchartered spaces
of the heavens…
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