Dearest Wolfi,<\/p>\n
Today, 27 January, I thought I\u2019d write to you personally to wish you the very happiest of happy birthdays.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I wonder if you know how much joy you have given us? Or the amount of money that has been made out of chocolates with your pictures imprinted on the foil? Or the crimes against musicality that have been committed in the name of your father, dear crusty old Leopold, and his Treatise on playing the violin? Or about the notion that listening to your music somehow makes babies clever (honest, guv, it\u2019s been said. Mozart for Babies\u2026) Perhaps you\u2019re up there on the Composers\u2019 Cloud with your friend Joseph Haydn, having a jolly good chuckle about it all. You and he must have been quite a double-act when you got going.<\/p>\n
Down here, we\u2019re all still wondering how you did it. What made you able to express the subtlest, deepest and truest strain of humanity through such apparently simple, effortless melodies? Of course, we all know how much work it takes to produce something that sounds \u2018simple and effortless\u2019, but there\u2019s also the notion that, as you said, you were \u2018your own copyist\u2019 \u2013 you heard the music in your head and just wrote it down\u2026your scores are astonishingly free of the sort of crossings-out that Beethoven and even Schubert used. Yet if Bach tells us about God, Beethoven about the universe and Schubert about the soul, you tell us about humanity. That\u2019s the mystery: how? If we knew the answer, if it was no longer mysterious, wouldn\u2019t we be less wonderstruck by it all? <\/p>\n
I\u2019m so glad you had a good librettist in da Ponte: there\u2019ve been few, if any, operas since then that have explored the cutting edge of sexually-charged relationships so effectively. The two of you were a dream team and I only wish you had had longer to work together. I\u2019d love to know if it was true about Casanova having some input into Don Giovanni<\/em>. I read recently that Goethe would have chosen you as his ideal composer for an opera on his Faust<\/em>; I hope that up on the Writers\u2019 Cloud he\u2019s not too disappointed that he got Schumann, Gounod and Schnittke instead. <\/p>\n It drives me absolutely nuts that you had to die young. I wonder what you would have done had you lived another few decades? The teenaged Chopin would have sought you out and played to you when you were a grand old man \u2013 you might have been his real-life mentor, instead of just from beyond the grave. Maybe Mendelssohn too; you\u2019d have liked him. You never lived to hear Haydn\u2019s The Creation<\/em> \u2013 you really missed something there, though I hope he\u2019s shown you the score by now. But what would you have made of Beethoven\u2019s Ninth Symphony? Sometimes I wonder if you\u2019d just have got the giggles listening to it: all that portentous stuff. I can\u2019t think of one portentous note in your music, not even in the Requiem or the Commendatore\u2019s entrance. <\/p>\n Schubert, perhaps, would have been your musical soulmate. Everyone rattles on about Beethoven\u2019s influence on him, but when I listen to him I hear yours far more strongly. Take the Schubert late C minor Sonata, D958. And your C minor Piano Concerto, K491. Look at the first movements. There are so many similarities I sometimes wonder whether he had your score in front of him and was cribbing the ideas. We\u2019re so hung up on criticising poor Franzi, the \u2018Little Mushroom\u2019 as his friends called him, for not writing things the way Beethoven did that we sometimes blind ourselves to what he really was doing, and why.<\/p>\n Pardon\u2026? \u2013 oh, right. I agree, it\u2019s your birthday, not Schubert\u2019s. Wolfi, there\u2019s only one way to celebrate your birthday and that\u2019s to listen to your music. Did you know that one of your very greatest interpreters today comes from Japan? OK, she grew up and trained in Vienna\u2026 yes, times have changed and a Japanese woman is arguably the finest Mozart pianist in the world. This couldn\u2019t have happened in the mid-18th<\/sup> century, and that means there is something to be said for the 21st<\/sup> after all! Here she is: Mitsuko Uchida, with the slow movement of your Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor, performed at the Festival that has made your birthplace of Salzburg a Mecca (if not always a spectacularly loved one) to music-lovers everywhere. <\/p>\n Wolfi, thank you. We love you. When you blow out your candles today, please make a good wish for the music world of our strange new century.<\/p>\n Lots of love,<\/p>\n Jess x<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n No related posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dearest Wolfi,Today, 27 January, I thought I’d write to you personally to wish you the very happiest of happy birthdays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/h3>\n