mozartiana

So the latest new-old-music by a dead-white-(de)composer to make it to my fandom-music-playlist is Mozart's Sonata for Piano and Violin in E minor, K304. Listening to this, one feels like an eavesdropper on an intimate conversation between two lovers who are continuously completing each other's sentences. i had no idea before this that Mozart could sound so plaintive, so desolate, in a good way, if plaintiveness and desolation can be seen in a positive sense.

i used to hate Mozart, way back when. The objection was that his music was too happy. i still find it difficult to appreciate his happy music - hence the positive plaintiveness - but i'm starting to see why people would like that almost-ridiculous happiness (not joy - no, Mozart doesn't do joy) in his music. It's a wistful longing, isn't it, for something beyond most of our everyday experience, an unadulterated, innocent happiness - love that is untainted by knowledge. It's the longing for Eden.

Even sadness in Mozart seems pure.

This yearning for simplicity - for the coolness of white cotton sheets, the goodness of plain white bread - for what the human heart cannot give. People are just too bloody complicated. Much as all that bloody complication makes for all that is interesting in life, once in a while one can't help but just want life to be purged of all that. One wants purity: of thought, motive and emotion, cold clear mountain springs speaking their quiet truth at the point of their making. And the illusion that this purity can be found, so easily, in the music of a fellow human being, can be too tempting to resist.
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