Books, Arts & Manners: A Time for Mozart

Anytime is a time for Mozart—whether to listen to him or to think about him. In his splendid biography of the composer, W. J. Turner put it best: “When you are a child, Mozart speaks to you as a child . . . but when you are a man, you find to your astonishment, that this music that seemed childlike, is completely adult and mature. At every age, this pure, pellucid day, this intangible transparency, awaits you and envelops you in its unruffled light.”

So pervasive and evergreen is the appeal of Mozart’s music that I doubt we could ever have too much of this one good thing, even in this year and the next as the music world revs up for 1991, when it will mark the bicentennial of the composer’s death. And yet, ahead lies a flood of Mozartiana that will test everyone’s endurance.

JA

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John Ardoin

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Anytime is a time for Mozart—whether to listen to him or to think about him. In his splendid biography of the composer, W. J. Turner put it best: “When you are a child, Mozart speaks to you as a child . . . but when you are a man, you find to your astonishment, that this music that seemed childlike, is completely adult and mature. At every age, this pure, pellucid day, this intangible transparency, awaits you and envelops you in its unruffled light.”

So pervasive and evergreen is the appeal of Mozart’s music that I doubt we could ever have too much of this one good thing, even in this year and the next as the music world revs up for 1991, when it will mark the bicentennial of the composer’s death. And yet, ahead lies a flood of Mozartiana that will test everyone’s endurance.