Mozart's concertos

I don't know who is your favorite composer or even if you have one.  Mine is Mozart.  When younger, I preferred Beethoven and Brahms.  The bombast, the power, the finality of their work was compelling.  It still is.  In the last years, my attention and love for Mozart has exceeded all others.  Even Bach and Haydn.  Even Prokofiev, and the other Russian masters.

Mozart's music, particularly the piano concertos, has a certain perfection at a level I barely understand.  As he may have said, each note is there for a reason, none less and no more would quite do.  There is no real bombast, no power, no thunder, but only perfection.  This evening I'm listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 14, KV 449.  Each movement is a wonder, though the third movement is incomparable.  It is like listening to a theme and variations on a theme of Mozart by Mozart.  The only disappointment is that it runs only about six minutes.  If only he had a bit more time and made it an even dozen minutes...

When the greatest mathematician of our era, Karl Friedrich Gauss, was asked how he developed his theories, he simply stated that all the scaffolding should be removed from the finished work. And it was! Not for Mozart. You can almost feel the sublime joy he must have experienced in making the composition.  

When the great physicist Albert Einstein was asked which of Mozart's concertos what his favorite, his answer was the one he listened to most recently.  Einstein had it nailed.  Twenty seven concertos, twenty seven works of perfection.  If any one of us could originally write just one of the movements of just one of the concertos, we would be acclaimed a musical genius.

Be careful.  You could be infected with the Mozart magic, and from this there is no cure.