His music, like most Enlightenment music, but more so simply by dint of its extraordinary quality, traverses those subtle, intimate regions where small shades of meaning can mean so much, like furtive glances across a room. But Mozart always operates at this scale, even in his mightiest works. Pieces which operate at a more human scale can be lost in this. Nothing in Mahler 2 or The Rite of Spring is moderate. All of those works, whilst supreme masterpieces, deal with extremes above all. This muscular power we seem as a society to tend to prioritise is not Mozart's way. For me, the works which garner most unanimous appreciation have perhaps been the tougher, more dramatic ones: Beethoven 5 over Beethoven 4 or 6 Brahms 4 over Brahms 2 or 3 Verdi Requiem over Don Carlos, Othello or Falstaff Stravinsky Rite of Spring over Petrouchka, Agon or Symphony in C Mahler 2 over Das Lied Von Der Erde or Kindertotenlieder. The issue of why Mozart is a stranger in our messed-up, impatient, overstimulated world, and why we need to approach him on different (musical) terms than the armour-plated ones we use to navigate our daily lives today if we are to appreciate what makes him so special.
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