Pensees: Mozart and Me

Mozart and Me

In this month two hundred and fifty years ago, Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus (Amadeus) Mozart was born. The day was January 27, 1756. He died of a mysterious fever thirty-five short years later. But the world still resonates with his music.

I just recently read another biography of this man, my favorite composer. Many of the same emotions, feelings, and spiritual reflections that I knew when I first read Mozart’s biography many years ago were once again aroused in my soul with this recent reading. Only this time my musings are deeper, darker, and heavier. I am now the age that Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart was when he entered into a Christ-less eternity.

Few life stories capture the pathos and tragedy of a human life designed for friendship with God (Theophilus or Amadeus, the Latin rendition of the same name, means “friend of God.”) as the life of this exceptional musician. Endowed with an exceptional reflection of the image of God in his immortal music and equipped with a genius to produce works that, unbound by time and space, still impact the world, Mozart would die alone in dark depression. His over-endowed life would finalize as a picture of the quintessential existence of brevity, failure, and despair.

I know that the mere mention of the word “Mozart” bores people

and they instinctively tune out the weirdo that actually appreciates that kind of music. But I would like to attempt to lure just a few readers into Mozart appreciation this month with a couple of articles about him, his music, and about the soul of man in musical worship. I do not pretend for one moment to be an expert on Mozart. I’m just a fan. But enthusiasm is contagious — I hope. I also do not want to insult anyone’s intelligence, but I may take the time to explain terms and concepts that are basic to some readers. I’d like to popularize Mozart. In the end, I hope that even those musicians that are more advanced than I will be patient enough to read these articles because my goal is not exclusively musical or cultural. If that were my only goal, I could direct the reader to a number of articles and books on the subject. My goal is also spiritual reflection.

Mozart’s music was pre-Romantic. The Romantic era of music spanned from the 1820s to the turn of the century. Some great music comes from this era. Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, for example, are some of the remarkable composers of that era. The music of this era was broader, freer, and elaborately expressive of emotional themes. The preceding era, Mozart’s era, was the Classical era and Mozart’s music reflects that time frame. In other words, there is a rigid discipline in his composition that never yields to the emotional exhibitionism that would dominate music in the following century. Yet, one can lose himself emotionally in Mozart, the music! This is what makes Mozart stand out above all the composers of his time and why he remains to this day one of the greatest composers to have ever lived. If one listens closely to Mozart’s church music, for example, one can almost hear the groaning of a man imagining the potential of musical worship and, yet still only in the sub-conscience of the composer, yearning to display the expanse and complexities of a soul in unleashed emotive worship. Listen to Mozart’s Mass in C Minor or one of my favorites, Laudate Dominum (KV 339), both works that I hope to guide you through in the following weeks, and you will hear musical expressions and combinations of themes and music that are almost impossible for mind, soul, and ears to comprehend in one hearing.

In fact, it is just that that makes Mozart fascinating. One has to train himself to appreciate his music. This is one of the reasons why Mozart died penniless. Even his contemporaries could not quickly enough absorb the grandeur of Mozart’s music to make it lucrative for him. He would be dead and gone before the world realized what had hit it. His music is too big to wrap one’s arms around in the first hearing. And one cannot listen to Mozart’s best music and do anything else. He demands one’s full attention, and even then one has to listen to his compositions many times over before he feels the power of the music.

It is in music as it is in the culinary arts. A McDonald’s rendition of meat is okay for instant gratification. Wolf it down. But a carefully dry-aged steak, cut by an expert meat man, and prepared by a professional chef merits thoughtful mastication! Nothing is wrong with cotton candy. I’m not one to condemn all lovers of cotton candy as ungodly, but I do agree that a mature person will assume the responsibility of developing a taste for healthier, more substantive food. So, if you are a musical cotton-candy friend, please take a few moments this month to try developing a taste for some musical dry-aged steak! I think it will be well worth your time.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to introduce you to some of the finest music that has ever been written. You may want to buy the music to listen to as you read my comments. I won’t be technical. I’m just an average guy that found something special. It’s like freshly roasted coffee. After you’ve tasted it, you want all your Folger friends to understand what it really means to wake up and smell the coffee. The best part of waking up is suddenly redefined! If only one or two of you dive into this Mozart experience, I’ll be thrilled. Otherwise, I will still have fun rambling about a topic I really enjoy!

A couple of years ago, I fought a mob in Rome to wrestle my way into the standing-room only capacity crowd in a Roman cathedral to hear one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, Mozart’s Requiem. Though I had to stand the entire time and breathe in European body odors, I stood fixated, my eyes and ears riveted to the musicians, my soul in tears.

Mozart’s Requiem, funeral music, was begun and never finished by the dying genius. He certainly had a premonition of his own impending death as he began the composition of his last work. He would never complete it. My soul wept in concert with the chorale that night because few had the potential of glorifying God in music as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus (Amadeus) Mozart. Few lived so miserably. Few have died so ruined.

Mozart’s music will show you the heights of beauty that fallen men can attain and the majestic expressions of worship he is capable of even while he slips irrevocably into eternal damnation.