Afraid of Mozart? I Don't Blame You

Probably you are one of the millions of poor souls upon whom Mozart's music was foisted in the name of "easy to play."  No wonder nobody wants to go hear it.

Candid conversation with listeners at my Mozart evenings reveals the extent to which this masterful art, evident already in sonatas he wrote at 15, has been trivialized.  If I survived with any serious (i.e., involuntarily deep) involvement in this music, it was because the vivid emotions aroused by specific sounds in his music so far eclipsed anything else I had ever encountered in piano sound that I persisted in figuring it out.  How could anything be that troubling, yet at times so pure?

In our culture's insistence on reducing individuals and individual works of art to types and prototypes we risk losing any sense of the specific, of the particular, be it person, note, or word.

Poor us.  Impoverished us.