Mere Mortals Eavesdropping: The Greatness of Mozart

By |2024-01-27T13:47:50-06:00January 26th, 2024|Categories: Featured, Music, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

Mozart was not like us. The question as to why Mozart died so young is always superseded by: How could he have existed at all? How could you ask more of a miracle? In 1991, the bicentennial of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s death was the occasion for massive festivals and grand recording projects, as well as [...]

“I Must Ever Weep”: Haydn’s Musical Elegy to Mozart

By |2023-12-04T17:30:05-06:00December 4th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Friendship, Joseph Haydn, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

When Wolfgang Mozart died on December 5, 1791, fellow composer Joseph Haydn was "quite beside [himself] over his death," and the older composer soon paid a veiled tribute to his young friend in the form of a sombre slow movement of a new symphony he was writing for his London tour. "I love him too [...]

The Musical Universe and Mozart’s “Magic Flute”

By |2023-09-29T17:54:29-05:00September 29th, 2023|Categories: Music, Peter Kalkavage, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

“The Magic Flute” has been called Mozart’s “Masonic opera,” and so it is. Mozart was a serious Freemason. But the Masonic influence is of secondary importance to the power and precision of Mozart’s music, which, like all great music, is inexhaustible. Every act of listening to this work brings new discoveries. “Feelings are ‘vectors’; for [...]

Music and the Enlightenment

By |2023-08-05T21:34:33-05:00August 5th, 2023|Categories: Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, Michael De Sapio, Music, Senior Contributors, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

The mature music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—the Viennese Classical composers—reflects the best ideals of the Enlightenment in that it embodies rational clarity and order and makes a direct appeal to the listener without undue obscurity. What they produced forms the backbone of a repertoire of music that is recognized and celebrated as some of [...]

The Top Ten Greatest Violin Concertos

By |2023-03-12T20:34:42-05:00March 12th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Camille Saint-Saëns, Felix Mendelssohn, Jean Sibelius, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

The violin concerto as a form of music has endured for some 300 years and remains, alongside the piano concerto, the most popular type of concerto played in modern concert halls and committed to recording. The genre was first developed during the Baroque era, when the concerto was conceived as a tripartite structure, running about fifteen [...]

Immortal Beloved: Musical Love Letters From the Great Composers

By |2023-02-13T20:23:11-06:00February 13th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Gustav Mahler, Hector Berlioz, Love, Ludwig van Beethoven, Music, Richard Wagner, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

Love has inspired countless composers, some of whom have written pieces dedicated to, or directly inspired by, their own beloveds. Here are ten of the best musical love letters ever composed. 1.  Wagner: Siegfried Idyll Though his reputation rests on his big, long, and loud mythological operas, Richard Wagner was also capable of composing on a [...]

Felix Mendelssohn: The Mozart of the Romantic Age

By |2023-02-02T14:50:33-06:00February 2nd, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Featured, Felix Mendelssohn, Music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

While original in his style, Felix Mendelssohn was certainly no radical. What he offered was a perfect blending of classical proportion with Romantic fervor. In that sense, he amounts to a kind of missing link between Mozart and the remainder of the nineteenth century. Of all the underrated genius-level composers of the nineteenth century, none [...]

Mozart the Romanticist

By |2023-01-26T17:57:31-06:00January 26th, 2023|Categories: Michael De Sapio, Music, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

Mozart’s genius consisted in absorbing, building upon, and transcending the musical influences of his day. The emotional complexity of his music raises it above the gracious, charming, but often superficial and forgettable aesthetics of the rococo era in which he was raised. In an essay in this journal titled “The Wild and Terrible Mozart,” Stephen [...]

What “Amadeus” Got Right

By |2022-08-17T16:29:19-05:00January 27th, 2022|Categories: Audio/Video, Film, Music, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

The movie "Amadeus" is a wondrous meditation, through the reminiscences of Antonio Salieri, on the ways of genius, the value of contrition, and the arbitrariness of metaphysical justice. "Amadeus" opened the door to a fantastic world of whose existence I had not been aware. The movie changed my life. "  —Anonymous viewer of the film [...]

Waking Mozart: The Mystery of the Requiem

By |2021-12-04T17:02:27-06:00December 4th, 2021|Categories: Art, Audio/Video, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

Who completed Mozart's unfinished Requiem? The masterpiece that we know today was the work of many hands. But who wrote which parts? And how much did Mozart actually write? "The last movement of his lips was an endeavor to indicate where the kettledrums should be used in his Requiem. I think I still hear the [...]

A Model for Mozart? Michael Haydn’s Requiem

By |2023-09-14T05:38:01-05:00November 1st, 2021|Categories: Audio/Video, Featured, Joseph Haydn, Michael Haydn, Music, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

Michael Haydn's Requiem—like the composer himself—has receded into the historical mists. But this astounding work heavily influenced Mozart's own Requiem and is worthy of comparison with every other setting of the Mass for the Dead ever composed. Michael Haydn The 1984 film Amadeus brought to the general public's attention that many minor composers [...]

Men and Women as They Are: Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”

By |2023-11-07T13:34:42-06:00May 1st, 2020|Categories: Audio/Video, Music, Opera, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

The characters in Mozart’s “Figaro” are the furthest thing from mere archetypes. Instead, they are as real and as identifiable as the people around us today, for Mozart was interested in human nature itself, and not the ephemeral and artificial distinctions of class. “In my opinion, each number in Figaro is a miracle,” composer Johannes [...]

Songs & Dances of Death: 10 Classical Works for the End of Time

By |2023-01-20T17:38:06-06:00March 12th, 2020|Categories: Audio/Video, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, Music, Richard Strauss, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

From Modest Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death to Oliver Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, here are ten great classical pieces about death and the end of this world. They may or may not provide you comfort. 1. Songs and Dances of Death, by Modest Mussorgsky A song cycle for voice (usually bass [...]

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