The greatest, prelude
Mozart as GOAT
Tyler Cowen says classical music “is one of the world’s greatest gifts to you, and essentially free.” I’m not entirely sure about that last part, but he is right that, as long as you have access to music, classical music is cheap, and probably much cheaper than it’s ever been. Even concerts, especially chamber music, tend to be less expensive than pop artists. Plus, all the scores are available for free online. And there’s enough to keep you busy for the rest of your life on YouTube.
Rankings may be overrated (according to my ranking). Yet here are two firmly held beliefs of mine.
One of my most conservative views is that I think Western classical music is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
I say this without any prejudice to other musical genres and traditions. My musical culture has many gaps and biases. I know very little about non-Western classical or art music traditions, and there are many of them. My view is simply this: a properly sensitized listener should be able to recognize the monumental value contained in the history of Western classical music. Other traditions may contain as much value; I just don’t know. If they do, then the world is even more awesome. I have listened to jazz for most of my life; I still listen to many of the punk rock bands from my teenage years. Music is wonderful; there is a lot of it.
I will die on that hill: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of the greatest minds to have walked the earth. He remains underrated by the smug and the sophisticates.
I adore Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, and admire and enjoy many other composers. But Mozart has always held a special spot in my musical world. A world without Mozart would have considerably less value. Sure, that is true, to some extent, of the other composers I adore, but when I imagine different worlds, each of which is deprived of just one of these composers, I find the Mozart-less world significantly more impoverished than the other ones. There are some pieces by other composers that I find more valuable than many of Mozart’s pieces (Beethoven’s late string quartets surpass Mozart’s string quartets), but I do not find in their catalog as much total value as I find in Mozart’s, and very few of those pieces reach the peaks of beauty that Mozart was capable of. So, for example, Beethoven’s late string quartets, late piano sonatas, and Ninth Symphonies are, to me, some of the greatest pieces of music ever written. I am very fond of Bach’s huge range of keyboard and organ works. And yet, just considering Mozart’s twenty-seven piano concertos overwhelms me. Then I consider his operas. His chamber music. The sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. The clarinet concerto. The sacred music. His work for two pianos or four hands. The mature symphonies. And on and on. There is no other composer whose work can as consistently elicit pure joy in me.
In the next few weeks, in a series of brief posts, I will try to motivate this idea, that Mozart adds a lot of value to my life, and maybe that it could add value to yours. The topics I’d like to cover are:
I want to highlight what some excellent people have said about him (some very moving quotes by Haydn, Chopin, Brahms, Mahler, Britten, and others, and outrageous claims by Glenn Gould).
Some beautiful underrated/neglected pieces.
Mozart, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
Broader reflections on the most beautiful music ever written, almost all of which by Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.