Let's assume that the history of western classical music had been the same
as it is except for one difference:  Mozart had been born 200 years later,
in 1956.

Up to that time, while deprived of Wolfgang Amadeus' oeuvre, we would
have had the benefit of his contemporaries, Haydn, of course, but also of
composers who are now often considered the second team, if considered at
all, like Salieri, Hummel, and Dittersdorf.

In the meantime, classical music would be developing with input from all
the other composers, giants and lesser mortals, that have been coming upon
the scene, just as has actually happened, but without the influence, direct
or indirect, of Mozart.

Finally, assume that Mozart, born in 1956, were to exhibit the same
precocity, and compose the same works that he had actually composed two
hundred years earlier.

How do the readers here believe his music would have been received? Would
it have been recognized as the work of a genius or simply tolerantly
accepted, if not disdainfully dismissed, as clever pastiche by a child
prodigy grown up?

My own feeling is that his four greatest operas (*Magic Flute* and the
three DaPonte operas) would be received w/ possibly even greater acclaim
than during his lifetime (except of course by those who don't like any
opera).  I should also suspect his major choral works would also be well
received.  But I wonder about his chamber music, his concertos, his
symphonies.  I'd like to think the same listeners who consider these to be
works of transcendent beauty and magnificence, in the actual world, where
this music was composed in the eighteenth century, would feel the same way
if the music had not been written until two centuries later.  But I'm not
sure.

Walter Meyer