So now I'm thinking about clear-headed thinking concerning Mozart. This is how I learned Mozart: My first exposure was the easy sonata in C, K. 545. It was in sheet music, so I was younger than 12. I found it incredibly frustrating: the tempo in the first movement was impossible to maintain; the scales, particularly those in F, were difficult beyond belief.

At about 12 I was assigned the G major, K. 283, this time in Kalmus volume of the collected sonatas, wisely ordered with a special Gambel-hinged binding. (It has not yet fallen apart.)

The sound of the G major troubled me so I rarely practiced it. Instead I wandered through the book playing passages here and there, some of which I adored and returned to again and again. Others I detested royally and would turn the page in protest. Among the things I objected to were gratuitous chromatics: why did he persistently use them in all the wrong places?

In this way I learned that Mozart uses tones specifically, not generically. Nothing in music theory prepared me to legitimatize these reactions. It is only in maturity that I recognize their power and how much insight they impart to the work of this remarkable composer.

Beauty is not the point--or, if it is, it is only insofar as it contrasts with other qualities of sound: the bitter, the unwanted, the intrusive--even the hateful.

My students, even the really young ones, learn that they have a feel for different tonalities on the piano. We work with that level of identification with sound; from it comes a sense of comprehension in reading Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin.