Felix Delbruck wrote a number of things that I agree with. He also wrote the following (in a variety of ways--I reproduce only one of them) that I don't exactly disagree with, but which seems very contrary to my own experience: >My point is that to me Beethoven is more 'direct' because his works can >be more easily analysed in non-musical terms that I can understand. In >Mozart, the non-musical parts are bound up with musical processes that I >can feel but not easily articulate, so from my perspective, Mozart appears >more shady and elusive. Insofar as I am inclined to interpret Mozart and Beethoven in non-musical terms (i.e., not in the terms of formal musical analysis), it is largely through the emotions their works seem to me to express. (If by "non-musical," Felix means something closer to the "storm" and "battlefield" images he uses elsewhere than to the expression of emotions, I apologize.) At this level, Beethoven and Mozart seem to me equally expressive, although the character of the emotions naturally varies considerably. In fact, it was because the emotions that I thought I encountered on listening to middle-period Beethoven seemed to me for a long time "vulgar" and "dated," that I had real difficulty in cultivating a taste for him (I've since overcome this problem, I'm happy to say). On the other hand, it was because I related so directly to the emotional world of Mozart that I found him so appealing: someone who gave expression to moods as I felt them or to moods I was interested in encountering. For me, it was Haydn, rather than either Mozart or Beethoven, who seemed to me often (not always, and I'm speaking comparatively here) emotionally opaque. My greatest pleasure in listening to Haydn has always been to "watch what he does" in purely musical terms, and that has also seemed to me to be his highest (not, of course, his only) interest. (None of this is said, in this context, as part of a covert argument directed at establishing who is the greatest composer of the three.) Felix also talks about the distance and ambiguity in the music Mozart provides for his opera characters. I think I know what he means, but it seems to me that the comments are most applicable to COSI FAN TUTTE, where artificiality belongs to the essence of the piece. I find the music for the characters in FIGARO not like that at all, and again my emotional reaction is direct and powerful. At any rate, here's one vote for finding an extramusical emotional vocabulary as apt for describing Mozart as for describing Beethoven. Nick [log in to unmask]