Mozart’s Statement of Faith

The musicologists often read more into a score than the notes warrant. They study Mozart’s short, frustrated life and come to conclusions about his music which the listening ear does not confirm. And so they tell us that in his Salzburg period, he wrote fifteen Masses in the mannered style demanded of him, became a Freemason, married, lived in Paris, was exposed to the polyphony of Bach, found disappointment in his marriage—and from the mélange of these experiences produced the Great Mass in C Minor (K 427).

It is not quite so simple to psychoanalyze the creation of this great work. For art distills far more than the superficial aspects of the artist’s personal history. There is such a thing as the deepening awareness of what Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life.” This, deriving from sources a musicologist can never uncover, may have dictated the form and mood of the C Minor Mass—his greatest contribution to the literature of Church music.

RT

About the Author

Ralph de Toledano

Featured Tags

The musicologists often read more into a score than the notes warrant. They study Mozart’s short, frustrated life and come to conclusions about his music which the listening ear does not confirm. And so they tell us that in his Salzburg period, he wrote fifteen Masses in the mannered style demanded of him, became a Freemason, married, lived in Paris, was exposed to the polyphony of Bach, found disappointment in his marriage—and from the mélange of these experiences produced the Great Mass in C Minor (K 427).

It is not quite so simple to psychoanalyze the creation of this great work. For art distills far more than the superficial aspects of the artist’s personal history. There is such a thing as the deepening awareness of what Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life.” This, deriving from sources a musicologist can never uncover, may have dictated the form and mood of the C Minor Mass—his greatest contribution to the literature of Church music.