It is the conventional wisdom that Mozart thought more in terms of the piano than of any other instrument. But the conventional wisdom forgets that he was also an accomplished violinist. After a concert tour, he could write his father, “I played as if I were the finest fiddler in Europe”—which perhaps he might have become. The violin is the most taxing of instruments, immediately and perilously responsive to touch and feeling, and calling for sensitivity even in the most bravura passages. When Mozart wrote for the violin, it
was as a violinist who had felt the strings beneath his fingers and the bow within his hand.
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