Jacek Niecko writes:

>With Mozart, one often suspects that the cascade-like, explosive nature
>of his gift prevented him from stepping back and seeing what it was that
>he had been doing.

This is certainly not my take on Mozart.  He seems to have been a very
self-conscious composer.  He has a lot of comments about his compositions
that seem to indicate that he knew just what he was doing.  Was it of
Osmin's arias that he described how he would produce the effects of losing
control while not violating basic rules of harmony? Or when he spoke of one
of his piano concertos (15?) as having passages that only the cognoscenti
could understand, although they were written in such a way that the less
educated would be pleased without knowing why.  He wrote that no one had
studied Italian opera librettos as he had, and I've never heard anyone
challenge his claim.  The reworkings on some of the Haydn quartets and (I
believe) the contrapuntal effects of the "Prague" Symphony show a composer
who was "cascade"-like only in the popular imagination.  When Beethoven,
on hearing strains of the c-minor piano concerto, said to a friend, "Such
things are forever denied to the likes of us," he was more than generous;
he was speaking the plain truth.  But not because the earlier composer was
a direct conduit for the divine (though, of course, in a way he was that,
too); Mozart, as far as I can tell, went beyond the status of child-prodigy
through sheer hard musical thought, and if he was a bit to early to create
an image of himself as a Romantic genius, he was, alas, just in time to
have the Romantics produce an image of him as a natural phenomenon with no
reflection or self-awareness at all.  Pity.  (The comments here are from
memory; the details may be in error, but I think the gist is accurate.)

Nick
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